They are easy to miss, yet they sit at the ceremonial heart of a Bronze Age stone circle whose own age took decades of scientific effort to pin down. The circle originally comprised seventeen stones, set on a natural rock terrace on the southern slope of a low hill in County Cork; two stones are now missing and one has fallen, but enough remains to read the geometry clearly. The main axis runs northeast to southwest across an internal span of nine metres, with the axial stone, the tallest and most substantial of the group, anchoring the southwest end.

Excavations carried out in 1957 by E.M. Fahy uncovered five pits sealed beneath a compacted gravel floor inside the circle. One pit held cremated human bone alongside fragments of shale and sherds of coarse pottery, a burial deposit that proved frustratingly difficult to date. The first radiocarbon result placed it improbably close to the birth of Christ, a figure later shifted to around AD 600, which scholars described as clearly anomalous. A more recent analysis of the same charcoal finally resolved the confusion, returning a date range of 1124 to 794 BC and placing the burial firmly in the Bronze Age. Fahy returned the following year, in 1958, to excavate two associated features nearby: a hut site and a fulacht fiadh, a type of ancient cooking site typically identified by a distinctive mound of fire-cracked stone beside a water source or trough. Other finds from the circle included seven pieces of flint, among them a small convex scraper, the kind of tool used for working hide or wood.

The site sits in pasture and is a National Monument in State Guardianship. The stones vary considerably in size, ranging from just over a metre in height to just over two metres, which gives the circle an uneven, organic quality rather than the uniform regularity one might expect. The cup-marks on the axial stone reward a close look; they are shallow and weathered, easily overlooked by anyone moving too quickly through the site.