The Ordnance Survey's six-inch mapping of that year, one of the most thorough topographical exercises ever carried out in Ireland, recorded field boundaries, roads, and even individual trees, yet this crossing went unmarked. That absence is its own kind of detail, suggesting either that the stones were added after the surveyors passed through, or that a crossing considered too modest or too informal to deserve ink on a map had nonetheless been in daily use by the people who lived alongside the river.

The stones themselves are practical objects rather than monumental ones. Each measures at most 1.2 metres by 0.6 metres, flat-topped and set at intervals across the channel. Seventeen of them in a line is a considerable investment of effort, and the width they span, close to fourteen metres, points to a river that floods or at least rises enough that a dry crossing mattered to whoever laid them. The Glanrastel is not a fast or dramatic watercourse at this point; the slow-flowing character of the water here is precisely what makes the stones workable rather than dangerous. Crossings like this were once common features of Irish rural life, placed where roads did not reach and where a ford alone would leave travellers wet to the knee.