That, at least, is the tradition. Today, no trace of those crosses remains visible at all.

The cairn itself, a mound of heaped stones of the kind used across prehistoric Ireland to mark burials or prominent high places, sits at the top of Mangerton and has its own separate archaeological record. The associated burial tradition was noted by Richard Hayward in 1987, who recorded that the three stone crosses beside the cairn were said to mark the graves of MacCarthy More, O Donoghue, and O Sullivan More. These were not minor figures. The MacCarthy More and O Sullivan More were among the pre-eminent Gaelic dynasties of Munster, and the O Donoghue lords were deeply rooted in the Kerry landscape around Lough Leane. Whether the graves themselves ever existed, or whether the stone crosses were a later act of commemoration rather than primary burial markers, is not recorded. What is certain is that by the time anyone thought to document them formally, the crosses had already disappeared, leaving only the oral and written tradition as evidence that they were ever there.