It is the last survivor of what was once a prehistoric stone row, aligned roughly east-north-east to south-west, and its solitude is relatively recent. Within living memory, two companion stones still flanked it; before that, local tradition held that five stones had stood here in all.

Researchers visiting the site in the 1930s recorded a row of three stones, with Bowman in 1934 noting the gaps between them with some precision: roughly fourteen feet nine inches between the first and second stones, and five feet seven inches between the second and third. He also gathered a telling piece of oral history, that the two smaller stones had lain buried under bog until the mid-nineteenth century, when they were presumably exposed during cutting or drainage works. Ó Drisceoil, writing in the same year, recorded their dimensions; the second stone stood about 1.1 metres high, the third around a metre. By 1984, local information confirmed that both had been removed around 1940, leaving only the tallest south-western stone still upright. Stone rows of this kind are a feature of the prehistoric landscape across Cork and Kerry, thought to date broadly to the Bronze Age, though their precise function remains debated. What makes this particular site quietly unsettling is the compressed timescale of its partial destruction. Monuments that survived several thousand years of Irish history were cleared within a generation. Approximately thirty metres to the south-south-west, a ring-barrow, a low circular earthwork typically associated with Bronze Age burial, sits close enough to suggest the two features were once part of a shared ceremonial or funerary landscape.