The north-eastern stone has toppled and now lies stretched across the pasture, measuring just under two metres in length, though calculations suggest that when upright it would have reached roughly 3.25 metres, making it a fairly imposing presence on what is already an elevated position along a ridge above the Bride River basin in mid Cork. Its companion, set about 0.7 metres to the south-west, still holds its ground at 2.25 metres tall. Together they are aligned along an east-north-east to west-south-west axis, a deliberate orientation that is typical of prehistoric paired standing stones in Ireland and which archaeologists have long associated with astronomical or ceremonial significance, though the precise purpose of any individual pair remains a matter of reasonable speculation.

Paired standing stones, sometimes called portal stones or simply stone pairs, appear across Munster in considerable numbers, and Sean Ó Nualláin's systematic survey of the type, published in 1988, catalogued this example as number 110 in his corpus. The Garranenamuddagh pair sits on the southern side of the Bride River basin, set into rolling pasture on a ridge that would once have commanded a broad view of the surrounding landscape. The fallen north-eastern stone is the larger of the two when its reconstructed height is taken into account, measuring 0.6 metres in thickness as well, which gives a sense of the effort involved in raising it in the first place. Exactly when they were erected is not recorded, but stone pairs of this kind in Cork and Kerry are generally understood to belong to the Bronze Age, somewhere in the broad span between 2500 and 500 BC.