The row at Íochtar Cua occupies the crest of a ridge between Lough Currane and Ballinskelligs Bay, and its four orthostats, a term for large upright stones used as structural elements, run ENE-WSW over a total length of 8.6 metres. The tallest reaches 2.8 metres, and several prostrate slabs lie between and against the uprights, at least one of whose functions remains unexplained. The row is incorporated into the north-western side of a suboval earthwork enclosure, and it is this unusual relationship that prompted the archaeologist Ó Nualláin, writing in 1988, to question its status as a monument in its own right.

The alignment of the row has attracted its own debate. Lynch, analysing the site in 1981, concluded that the stones were oriented on the setting sun at the winter solstice, a solar alignment that would place its construction within a tradition of prehistoric monuments designed to mark seasonal transitions. That interpretation sits alongside a much older layer of local tradition. The site is reputed to be the burial place of Sceine, wife of Amergin, the poet and druid who led the Milesian people, the mythological ancestors of the Gaels, in their legendary invasion of Ireland. Whether that tradition is ancient or a later accretion is impossible to say, but it gives the stones a presence in Irish mythology that most field monuments simply do not carry. Lynch had also examined the enclosure itself at an earlier date, recording a stone-built bank roughly 1.2 metres wide and 0.9 metres high; by the time later surveys were carried out, that bank had been considerably reduced, with its outer face standing just 1.3 metres high on the western side and its interior almost level with the top of the bank. An entrance gap at the eastern side, about a metre wide and flanked by a surviving upright, hints at how the enclosure may once have been approached.