They did not. This is an ancient quarry, caught at the precise moment of abandonment sometime in the Chalcolithic or Early Bronze Age, and it has remained in that suspended state ever since. The grykes here, the deep natural fissures that split the limestone pavement, do not run in the orderly parallel lines typical of the Burren; they converge and diverge unpredictably, and the prehistoric quarry workers appear to have exploited this irregularity, working the natural joints in the rock to free the slabs from the ground.

The three stones tell slightly different stories of progress interrupted. The most northerly slab, measuring roughly 2.4 metres long and 3 metres wide, has been raised 0.8 metres along its western side and rests on a single supporting boulder, its leading edge already pushed out over a gryke running to the south. Ten metres further south, a second slab of 3 metres by 1.6 metres has been lifted only fractionally, around 0.2 metres, with a small boulder wedged beneath its western edge; a nearby stone may have been pushed out during the lifting, or set aside for use in raising it further. The third slab, 3 metres to the west of the second, had progressed furthest: lifted 0.7 metres and resting on a stone, aligned roughly west-northwest to east-southeast. But its eastern corner had cracked, which may well be the reason it was left where it sat, now largely swallowed by scrub. All three were almost certainly destined for use in the construction of wedge tombs, a form of megalithic monument in which a trapezoidal stone chamber narrows and lowers toward one end, typically the east or northeast. Four such tombs belonging to the Roughan Hill group lie between 40 and 100 metres away to the northeast and southeast. Excavations led by Ronan Ó Maoldúin between 2015 and 2022 at three tombs in the surrounding area confirmed that this cluster dates to the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age, a period running from roughly 2500 to 1500 BC. The quarry sits within a wider multiperiod field system, suggesting this landscape was intensively organised and worked across generations. What the quarry offers, unusually, is not a finished monument but the evidence of the process itself, the planning, the physical effort, and in at least one case, the moment when a cracked corner ended the work before it could begin.