They follow no obvious pattern, there is no alignment pointing to a solstice or a cardinal direction, and with one exception, a stone circle in Cullaun, they appear to have been placed without any governing geometry. That exception, far from clarifying things, only makes the rest more puzzling. The stone recorded here as 5J1 is a modest example, a rectangular block of roughly 0.75 metres high, orientated north to south, and it would be easy to walk past it without a second thought. The scale of what surrounds it is what gives it weight.

When the Inspector of National Monuments surveyed the area between 1934 and 1936, he counted 221 stones still standing, 173 in Timoney Hills and 48 in Cullaun, and described the group as "a most remarkable" collection. All are cut from red sandstone or conglomerate, with heights ranging from roughly 0.9 to 1.8 metres, the larger ones averaging around 1.5 metres. A later survey published in the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin, by Stout in 1984, mapped 245 stones in total, though 70 had by then been removed, along with five cairns that have since disappeared entirely. The losses are considerable, but what remains is still one of the largest concentrations of standing stones in Ireland. There is, however, a complicating question hanging over all of it. The stones sit within the landscaped grounds of Timoney Park, the estate of the Parker-Hutchinson family, and that setting has led some to question whether the monuments are genuinely prehistoric or whether they were arranged, augmented, or relocated as part of estate improvement in more recent centuries. It is a question that has not been definitively answered.