Stone rows are among the more quietly puzzling monuments left by prehistoric communities in Ireland. Unlike the drama of a megalithic tomb or the obvious geometry of a stone circle, a row of two or three upright stones can look almost accidental, easy to pass without a second glance. The example at Knockaturnory, on a westward-facing slope above a col between Croughaun Hill and the Comeragh Mountains, was modest even by those standards: three conglomerate stones set in an east-west line stretching 4.3 metres, with a fourth stone lying flat at the western end. The tallest, at the eastern end, reached just under a metre in height. What made the alignment worth recording was precisely that quiet precision, the consistent east-west orientation of each individual stone matching the orientation of the row itself, and the careful spacing between them.

When the site was formally described in the Archaeological Inventory of County Waterford, published in 1999, the three standing stones were still in place. The easternmost was rectangular, roughly 1.1 metres long and 0.95 metres tall. The central stone was slightly shorter and broader, and the westernmost was triangular in plan, tapering toward its top. The gaps between them, 0.7 metres and then 0.5 metres moving westward, suggest something deliberate rather than casual about their arrangement. Stone rows of this type are generally assigned to the Bronze Age in Ireland, though dating individual examples without excavation is difficult. They may have marked routeways, served as territorial indicators, or held astronomical significance; no single explanation has settled the question. By January 2012, however, the row had been removed entirely, leaving the col and the mountain slope without the stones that had stood there, in some form, for potentially three or four thousand years.