By the mid-twentieth century, surveyors had counted 221 of them spread across two townlands, Timoney Hills and the adjoining Cullaun, with a further survey later placing the original total at 245. That is an extraordinary concentration of upright stones for any landscape in Ireland, and yet nobody is entirely sure what they mean, or even how old they are.

When the Inspector of National Monuments recorded the group in 1934 to 1936, he noted that the stones, all of red sandstone or conglomerate, ranged from roughly 0.9 to 1.8 metres above ground and showed no obvious systematic arrangement, aside from one stone circle in Cullaun. The stones were simply there, distributed across the fields without the kind of alignment or enclosure that might suggest a ceremonial purpose. By the time of that survey, a significant number had already been lost; Stout's 1984 Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin recorded that 70 had been removed, along with five cairns that had also disappeared. The particular stone classified as 4B in that survey, a rectangular slab measuring 1.21 metres high and orientated east to west on its long axis, survives today in undulating pasture that once formed part of the landscaped estate of Timoney Park. Notably, no packing stones were found around its base, which is one of several details that complicate any straightforward reading of the site. The whole group sits on land associated with the Parker-Hutchinson estate, and that setting on a managed private demesne has led some to question whether all of these stones genuinely belong to prehistoric times, or whether some may have been introduced or rearranged during the improvement and landscaping fashions of a later era.