These are bee-bowls, recesses built into walls or banks to house straw skeps, the domed baskets that served as beehives before the modern box hive became standard. They are not especially common survivals in Ireland, which makes finding three together in a single garden wall quietly remarkable.

The garden itself is a large rectangular enclosure, measuring roughly 84 metres along its longer axis and 50 metres across, defined by masonry walls that stand up to two metres in places but are incomplete on every side. It sits about 200 metres outside the medieval town wall of Rindown, a fortified Anglo-Norman settlement whose remains still occupy the narrow peninsula reaching into Lough Ree. The bee-bowls are set into the centre of the north-west wall. St John's Church lies approximately 30 metres to the south, and St John's graveyard occupies the ground immediately to the south-east. The proximity of church and graveyard suggests the garden may have been associated with an ecclesiastical or monastic household, where beekeeping would have been a practical necessity; beeswax was essential for candles, and honey served both as sweetener and as medicine in the medieval and early modern periods.

The whole complex rewards a slow look. The grass-covered interior gives little away at ground level, but the walls, fragmentary as they are, carry the bee-bowls well, and their neat pointed profiles are easy to distinguish once you know what you are looking for.