These are not shelters or field walls in any conventional sense. They are coffin-rests, the places where funeral parties would set down their burden and rest before pressing on across a steep and difficult pass. The custom of throwing a single stone through one of the window-like opes as you pass is still observed, a gesture that connects travellers today to a much older and more sombre kind of passage.

The structures sit on the north verge of the trackway that crosses the mountain between Killary Harbour and Killary Bay Little, following the same line as the townland boundary. They were used, according to local tradition, by the people of Bunowen village on Killary Harbour, who carried their dead across this exposed mountain route to be buried in the graveyard at Foher. The pass would have been the only practical way through for a community living on the southern shore of Killary, and the effort involved in such a crossing, across rough ground and steep gradients, is not hard to imagine. By 1841, the travel writers Mr and Mrs S. C. Hall were already noting the presence of what they called "rude heaps of stones ranged along the sides" of the pass, and their account includes an illustration of a small cairn topped with a wooden cross. The Ordnance Survey six-inch maps record seven of these enclosures in total, their near-square footprints still legible on the ground.