There is little to suggest, looking at it now, that this was once a complete multiple-stone circle, the kind of prehistoric monument in which a ring of standing stones surrounds a central stone. Cork contains a remarkable concentration of such circles, most of them dating to the Bronze Age, and Garryglass would once have been among them.

The Ordnance Survey Name Book of 1841 recorded the site in considerably better condition, describing a druidical circle consisting of eleven stones placed in a ring around a central one, the stones varying in height from two and a half to three feet. The term "druidical" was the standard nineteenth-century shorthand for any prehistoric megalithic monument, applied broadly and without the precision that later archaeology would demand. What those surveyors were recording was a multiple-stone circle with a central standing stone, a monument type found across West Cork and Kerry. By the time modern surveys reached the site, only one stone remained upright, the rest presumably removed, buried, or broken up in the intervening century and a half.