The spot carries the name "Pillars" on the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, and later editions from 1897 and 1916 record the same features as "Gate Piers". By the time anyone went looking in 1998, there was nothing visible at the site to confirm they had ever stood.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1900, described the piers here as part of a broader landscape feature: a long walled avenue with the piers of two gateways, visible to a traveller driving towards Corofin. A second set of gate piers survives about 550 metres to the north-west, and together they seem to have marked the approach to some now-obscure demesne or estate. What exactly the "Pillars" once marked, or when they disappeared, is not recorded. The name itself stuck on the maps long after the structures had gone, which is its own kind of quiet peculiarity. Place names in Ireland frequently outlast the physical things they once described, preserving a memory of features that have since been robbed for building stone, swallowed by hedgerow, or simply worn away.

The immediate surroundings add further texture to the absence. About 57 metres to the south-east lie an early Christian cross and a tau cross, the latter being a T-shaped stone cross form associated with early medieval Irish ecclesiastical sites. Roughly 87 metres to the south-south-east there is a cashel, a dry-stone ringfort of the kind common across the Burren, along with a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically used for storage or refuge in the early medieval period. The gate piers, whatever they were, stood in well-layered company.