Quartz was not a casual choice in prehistoric Ireland; the material carried clear ritual significance, appearing repeatedly at passage tombs, burial sites, and ceremonial monuments across the island, which makes its use here, in what might otherwise seem an unremarkable pair of standing stones on a low rise, quietly suggestive of deliberate, careful intent.

One of the two stones now lies flat, measuring roughly 0.9 metres by 0.7 metres by 0.4 metres, toppled at some point in the past by unknown agency. Its companion to the south still stands, pyramidal in form and reaching about 0.9 metres in height. The pair does not exist in isolation. They form part of a wider complex of monuments concentrated around Lough Sheeauns to the west, a grouping that implies this stretch of west Galway was once a landscape of some ceremonial or social importance, with individual sites relating to one another across the terrain. The scholar Seán Ó Nualláin documented the stones in 1988, though his original record placed them incorrectly in the townland of Sheeauns rather than Ballynew, a small cartographic error that was subsequently corrected.