They are not especially large, not especially old in any datable sense, and not marked on most maps that a visitor would carry. What makes them unusual is their purpose: these are penitential stations, places where people once came to perform acts of devotion or penance, walking a circuit and pausing at each cairn as a formal religious exercise. The practice of organising prayer around a set of outdoor stations, marked by cairns or upright stones rather than a formal building, belongs to a tradition of vernacular devotion that survived well into the modern period in the west of Ireland, often at sites with no obvious connection to a named saint or a recorded foundation.

The cairns were formally noted in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, on the basis of a map annotation made by Tom Coffey in 1994, though a photograph from 1946, taken by the folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair for the National Folklore Collection, shows them under the heading 'Stone-Heap Memorials', which suggests they were already recognised as a distinct category of monument at mid-century. The cairn recorded as CL010-137002 is a subcircular mound roughly 1.7 metres in diameter and 1.3 metres high, with a thin upright stone slab set into its top in the manner of a grave marker. It stands about six metres south-south-west of the largest cairn in the group. The visual resemblance to a grave is unlikely to be accidental; penitential stations frequently borrowed the language of burial and memorial, blurring the line between prayer for the living and commemoration of the dead.