They look, at first glance, like a modest and unremarkable pair. What makes them quietly unsettling is what is missing: according to the landowner interviewed in 1934, there were originally seven.

The site belongs to the category of prehistoric monument known as a stone row, a linear arrangement of standing stones whose precise purpose remains debated but which appear throughout Cork and Kerry in considerable numbers. The seven stones at Knockatooan were described as dalláns, a term for tall, pillar-like standing stones, and they once descended in height from around four feet nine inches down to one foot six, presumably forming a graded sequence along a line. Sometime before the 1930s, five of them were removed and broken up for use in building a lime kiln nearby. A lime kiln is a simple stone furnace used to burn limestone and produce quicklime for agricultural use, and the one that consumed these prehistoric stones has itself since been levelled, leaving no trace. The remaining west stone, aligned roughly north-northeast to south-southwest, stands about a metre tall. The east stone has its own more recent history of disruption: it was knocked over sometime in the mid-1980s and re-erected, though not in its original position in the line to the south, but parallel to its neighbour instead. The two stones now stand side by side rather than in sequence, a pairing born entirely of accident and hasty repair rather than prehistoric intent.