The monument is incomplete, its stones arranged in an arc running from east-south-east to north-north-west rather than forming a closed ring, and that incompleteness is part of what makes it worth attention. Nine stones remain in total, eight of them upright, ranging in height from just over a metre to two metres, and one now fallen. A tenth stands only forty centimetres high and appears to have been broken at some point, though whether by age, frost, or human interference is unknown.

What gives the circle its particular character is the grading of the stones. In the southern half of the arc, the uprights decrease in height as they approach what archaeologists call the axial stone, the single recumbent-style marker placed at the monument's south-west that is both the longest and the lowest of the group. This stone leans inward and has a distinctively flat top, a feature common to the axial stones of Cork and Kerry multiple-stone circles, a Bronze Age tradition concentrated in the south-west of Ireland. The overall diameter of the arc measures 7.5 metres. Seán Ó Nualláin, writing in 1984, calculated that if the design had been symmetrical, the original circle would have comprised thirteen closely-set stones, making the current nine survivors a significant but incomplete remnant of what was once planned or built.