None of them is particularly tall; the highest reaches only about 0.9 metres, roughly the height of a child. Yet their arrangement is deliberate and precise enough to rule out any accident of geology. Three are aligned along a NNE-SSW axis, spaced closely together. The fourth breaks away from that line, standing some two and a half metres to the northwest of the central stone, its own long axis oriented NNW-SSE. That slight deviation is exactly the kind of detail that makes prehistoric stone rows so persistently puzzling.

Stone rows, sometimes called stone alignments, are a recurring feature of the Bronze Age landscape across the southwest of Ireland, concentrated particularly in Cork and Kerry. They range from modest two-stone settings to longer multiple-stone arrangements, and while various theories have been proposed connecting them to solar or lunar orientations, to ritual processions, or to territorial markers, no single explanation has won general agreement. What can be said is that the effort of selecting, transporting, and erecting even modestly sized standing stones was considerable, which implies a community that had both the organisation and the motivation to do it. The bogland setting at Knockoura, now waterlogged and remote-feeling, would have looked quite different in the Bronze Age, when much of what is now blanket bog across Munster was open, relatively dry ground suitable for grazing and settlement. The encroaching peat preserved countless features that might otherwise have been disturbed or destroyed over the intervening millennia, which is part of why the Cork and Kerry uplands hold such a concentration of surviving prehistoric monuments.