Two still stand; the third, the one that would have been the tallest of the group, lies flat on the ground. That fallen stone is four metres long and over a metre wide, which gives some sense of the ambition behind whatever ceremony or belief system prompted people to haul it here and set it upright in the first place.

Stone rows of this kind are a feature of the prehistoric landscape across Munster and into west Cork in particular. They tend to date to the Bronze Age, though their precise function remains genuinely uncertain; alignment with solar or lunar events has been proposed, as has a role in marking boundaries or ritual pathways. The Canrooska row was catalogued by Seán Ó Nualláin, whose systematic survey of Irish stone rows in the 1980s remains a key reference for these monuments. The two standing stones are modest in height, reaching 0.4 metres and 0.7 metres respectively, which makes the prone south-western stone all the more striking by contrast. A cairn, a mound of stones that typically covered a prehistoric burial, sits roughly seven metres to the south of the row, suggesting this area once formed part of a wider complex of monuments rather than a single isolated feature.

The site sits on open bogland, and the bog itself has likely helped preserve what survives. Peat accumulation can obscure the true dimensions of monuments over centuries, so the fallen stone in particular may be more deeply embedded than its visible measurements suggest.