The stones are small and medium-sized, densely packed, moss-covered in places, and rounded at the top where centuries of accumulation have settled and slumped. A modern statue of a saint now stands at the cairn's north-eastern end on a concrete plinth, with a low mortared wall running southward from it to shore up that end of the mound. The whole site sits within a fenced rectangular enclosure, and the Ballymeeny River runs below, audible before it is visible from the path that drops down the ravine slope.

The cairn appears on Ordnance Survey maps from both 1837 and 1913, labelled simply 'Saints Grave', which suggests the site was already well-established in local memory long before cartographers recorded it. Its association with St. Farannan is kept by oral tradition rather than any surviving documentary record. What makes the place particularly interesting is the devotional circuit, or pattern, that pilgrims once performed here. A pattern is a rounds-based act of pilgrimage, usually tied to a saint's feast day, in which participants move between a series of sacred points in a prescribed order, often praying at each. At Doonaltan, that circuit involved a holy well on the western slope of the ravine, roughly sixty metres to the north-west of the cairn. Pilgrims would then cross the river, where an altar stands on the eastern bank, and collect a stone from a pool in the river itself, that pool also considered a holy well. The stone gathered from the water was then carried up and placed on the cairn.

The result of that repeated act is the cairn itself, or at least a significant part of it: a mound built up, stone by stone, by people completing their devotions and leaving something of the journey behind. The rough path down the ravine to the river still exists, and the altar on the eastern bank remains in place.