It sits on the townland boundary between Glenlary and Cloghast in County Limerick, its concentric rings of stone arranged around a modern Ordnance Survey trig station that squats at the centre, interrupting the innermost circle and making any clean survey of the whole structure impossible. What precisely the monument is, a passage tomb, a kerb-circle, a robbed-out cairn, or something else entirely, remains an open question. Archaeologists have been looking at it for well over a century and have not settled the matter.

The site does not appear on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, which is itself a minor puzzle. By 1897 it had been annotated as a stone circle on the 25-inch sheet, and by the 1901 edition it was labelled a cromlech stone circle, a term that reflects the rather fluid vocabulary nineteenth-century surveyors applied to ancient monuments. The most detailed early description comes from Lynch and Fogerty in 1911, who recorded three concentric arrangements of stone. The outermost ring measured roughly 47 feet north to south and contained seventeen stones of varying height; the middle ring, about 36 feet in diameter, was formed of eleven stones; and the innermost, the highest point of the site, consisted of five stones, one of them nearly buried. Lynch noted that the ground to the south falls away sharply towards a cliff face, and that several stones on that side had already toppled or were in danger of doing so. De Valera and Ó Nualláin, writing in 1982, suggested the concentric rings most likely represent the surviving kerbstones of a cairn, a mound of stones typically raised over a burial chamber, and noted that the site looks directly across a valley to the passage tomb at Duntryleague, approximately 6.4 kilometres to the north-east. Whether any structural relationship exists between the two sites is unresolved. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland examined it in 2000, they found the innermost ring offset to the east of centre rather than symmetrically placed, adding another irregularity to the record.

The summit is accessible on foot, and the effort of the climb at least rewards the visitor with the elevated position that the monument's builders presumably valued. Additional megalithic structures lie approximately 155 metres to the north-west. The stones themselves are thought to be sandstone or shale, though even this has not been confirmed definitively. Aerial orthophotographs taken between 2005 and 2012, and a Google Earth image from June 2018, show the ring arrangement clearly from above, which is in some ways the most legible view available of a site that, at ground level, presents itself as a scatter of fallen and leaning stones on a windswept hilltop, still largely unexplained.