These are penitential stations, places where people would historically walk a prescribed circuit, praying and performing acts of penance at each stopping point. The practice is an old one in Ireland, often tied to early Christian sites, and the physical markers left behind range from simple heaps of stone to elaborately maintained crosses and flags.

A photograph taken in 1946 and held in the National Folklore Collection labels these structures "Stone-Heap Memorials", a description that captures something of their plain, accumulated character. They were formally recorded as a penitential station in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, drawing on a map annotation made by Tom Coffey in 1994. The cairns are distributed along the ridge in a way that suggests a defined devotional route rather than random accumulation. One of them, a roughly rectangular mound measuring approximately 3.3 metres east to west and standing 1.6 metres high, lies around 20 metres north of the main cairn of the group, with another cairn a further 7 metres to the north-west. By 1999, at least one of the cairns carried an upright flag stone, a marker that had fallen or been removed by the time a survey visit was made in 2023, though several flat stones lying askew on the cairn top may be the same flags, since displaced. Around 800 metres downhill to the south-east lies Glencolumbkille Church and its associated graveyard, a proximity that hints at the devotional geography linking these hilltop stations to the community below.

The cairns sit in open, exposed terrain, and the limestone underfoot and the rough grazing around them mean the setting has changed little in outward appearance. The fallen flags on at least one cairn are worth noting as you approach; what looks like disordered rubble on top may be the remnants of markers that once gave the station a more upright, deliberate presence.