They form no recognisable arrangement, which is itself the puzzle. Most prehistoric stone groupings, even ruined ones, betray some logic of alignment or enclosure. These stones offer nothing so reassuring.

When archaeologists Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin described the site in 1972, they recorded the stones as "superimposed" and "resting in an inclined position," and were candid about how little could be concluded from that. There are traces of what might be a cairn, a mound of loose stones that in other contexts would indicate a burial monument, particularly visible on the northern side. But the qualifications mount quickly: the nature of the site is uncertain, they wrote, and it may in fact be entirely natural. That last possibility is worth sitting with. The bogland that stretches away to the east and south of the rise has its own long history of shaping and depositing stone, and glacial or erosional processes can occasionally produce accumulations that look, at a certain angle, almost deliberate. Whether these stones were ever arranged by human hands, or whether they simply ended up here through the slow work of geology, remains an open question.