What quietly complicates the picture is the word used for them locally: gallauns, the Irish term for a single upright stone, yet here applied to a pair. The name hints at a long oral familiarity with these stones that predates any formal classification.

By the 1840s, when Ordnance Survey fieldworkers were moving through the Killorglin area gathering place-name information, the two stones were already described simply as 'two high rocks' known as gallauns, suggesting they were a settled, unremarkable feature of the landscape to those living nearby. The larger of the stones carries some faint scratch marks on the corner of its southwest face. Whether these are ancient markings, the casual work of a later hand, or the result of animals rubbing against the stone over generations is not recorded. About 190 metres to the northeast lies a rath, a circular earthwork enclosure of the kind used as a farmstead in early medieval Ireland, and its proximity to the stones is one of those geographical details that invites speculation without quite resolving anything.