They are now painted white, which does nothing to make them less strange. A stone row is a prehistoric monument type found across Ireland and Britain, generally thought to date from the Bronze Age, though their precise purpose remains debated. What is more immediately curious here is the gap between what the stones almost certainly are, ancient and probably ritual, and what local memory has made of them.

By 1849, the Reverend P. Moore was already noting that the three stones were commonly called "the three friars," though he was sceptical about any literal explanation for the name. He concluded it derived from nothing more dramatic than the stones being "grouped together in mute and fraternal companionship." That dry, almost affectionate reading did not stick. Local tradition has since elaborated the story considerably, and the stones are now widely said to mark the spot where three monks were killed by Cromwellian forces in 1651, a period that left a long shadow across Kilkenny and the surrounding counties. Whether the name shaped the story or a faint memory of actual violence attached itself to a convenient landmark is impossible to say now. The northernmost of the three fell in 2012 and was re-erected in 2015, at which point all three received their coat of white paint, a detail reported in the Munster Express that February.

The stones themselves are modest in scale but carefully proportioned in their arrangement: the southernmost reaches 1.35 metres, the middle 1.25 metres, and the northern stone 1.1 metres, set between 1.2 and 1.7 metres apart. The decreasing heights give the row a quiet directionality, as if it is orienting itself toward something. The white paint makes them visible from a distance across the grass, which may be the point.