What visitors see today is a U-shaped arrangement of loosely set upright stones, and the question of how closely that arrangement reflects anything prehistoric is, to put it gently, open. A reconstruction carried out around 1964 means that the monument most likely bears little resemblance to its original form, which places it in an unusual category: a prehistoric site that is also, in part, a twentieth-century intervention.

The earliest detailed account dates from 1841, when the circle was recorded as thirty-five feet and six inches in diameter, comprising twelve standing stones each ranging from four to five feet ten inches in height. At the centre stood what the nineteenth-century observer called a cromlech, a term then loosely applied to megalithic structures; what remains there now is described as a possible boulder-burial, a type of monument in which a large stone or stones cover a burial deposit. By the time the scholar Seán Ó Nualláin examined the site in 1984, he noted that it had been in a ruinous condition for many years before that mid-century reconstruction took place. The work done in 1964 tidied things up, but in doing so it almost certainly rearranged stones whose original positions were no longer recoverable, leaving the current layout as an approximation at best.