The stones, almost all aligned east to west and only shallowly set into the ground, were not ancient Bronze Age monuments of the kind that surround them. They were thought to possibly mark graves, described with deliberate caution as burials "of a late date", a phrase that in archaeological usage usually points toward the early Christian or medieval period rather than prehistory. When surveyors returned to look for them in 1994, the stones could not be found.

What makes the spot quietly peculiar is its setting. The stones sat immediately to the south-east of a cairn, itself one component of a dense prehistoric complex on the same ground: a five-stone circle, a radial stone cairn, two stone pairs, and three cairns in total. A five-stone circle is a distinctively Irish monument type, consisting of four upright stones with a fifth laid horizontally as a recumbent, and the concentration of such features at Knockraheen suggests the landscape held ritual or ceremonial significance across a long span of prehistory. The low stones recorded in 1986 were first pointed out by a local man, who believed them to be another stone circle. The surveyors disagreed, but their alternative reading, that these were grave markers of some kind, was itself never confirmed. The stones were recorded once, interpreted tentatively, and then the ground gave nothing more.