They are not burial monuments or ritual constructions in any grand sense. They are almost certainly clearance cairns, the accumulated result of someone repeatedly picking stones out of the ground to make fields workable, and simply piling them somewhere out of the way. That mundane origin makes them, in their own quiet way, more evocative than something built for ceremony. They are the physical residue of ordinary agricultural labour, preserved on a small island that most people have never heard of.

Beginish sits between Valentia Island and the Kerry mainland, at the northern end of Valentia Harbour. At certain low tides, a curving sandbar at its south-eastern tip connects it to the nearby Church Island. The highest point of the island's eastern end is called Canroe, and the settlement that spreads across it is unexpectedly substantial: eight houses, fifteen cairns, eight animal shelters, and two poorly built structures of unclear purpose, all set within a network of fields and walls. An iron smelting site lies at the western end of the island. The archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly investigated the complex in the early 1950s, excavating two houses, one cairn, and one animal shelter. Fourteen of the fifteen cairns cluster on the eastern side of Canroe; the fifteenth sits closer to the houses on the western side. The one cairn that was fully excavated measured 3.5 metres in diameter and half a metre high, and yielded no finds at all. The animal shelters, built from rough low walls and mostly crescentic in plan, appear to have been unroofed windbreaks for livestock rather than enclosed structures. The picture that emerges is of a self-contained farming community working difficult, stony ground on a small Atlantic island, leaving behind almost nothing except the stones they moved.