The Ordnance Survey map of 1903 marked them confidently as stone circles, which would have made them remarkable additions to an already monument-dense landscape. The difficulty is that before the lake was drained in the nineteenth century, all three were underwater, and what looks like deliberate human arrangement from the shore may tell a rather different story entirely.

When antiquarian T. Crofton Croker visited in 1833, he counted the stones carefully and recorded three distinct rings: the largest twenty yards in diameter with fifteen stones, a middle circle of thirteen yards with eight stones, and the smallest at eight yards with seven stones. He also noted two parallel lines of stones extending from one circle toward the water, and a serpentine passage of similar stones running toward a stretch of low ground called the Red Bog. It read, on paper, like a complex of related structures. By 1912, however, Bertram Windle had grown sceptical. Writing up the site as Site G in his survey, he argued that the ground must have been submerged when the nearby Black Castle was built, since the castle's lakeside defences would otherwise have served no purpose. A local resident had confirmed to him that the water still rose to the wall between the stones and the road on occasion, and had himself fished over the spot. Windle concluded the stones were purely natural. The current designation as a probable crannog cairn or settlement platform, a crannog being an artificial or modified island used for habitation, reflects a middle position: the settings might represent the structural remains of something deliberately built out into the lake, but the question is genuinely open. Excavation of a similar-looking arrangement elsewhere at Lough Gur, recorded by Ó Ríordáin in 1949, turned out to be a natural feature with no archaeological significance at all.

The site sits along the south-eastern shoreline of Lough Gur, close to the ruins of the New Church, and is accessible by following the lakeshore path in that direction. Two of the three stone settings are conjoined, with the third standing roughly 25 metres to the north-east. The ground here can be waterlogged after rain, and the stones are at their most legible when lake levels are low. What you are looking at may be the remnant of a platform built out over the water, or it may be nothing more than the lake asserting its own geology. Either way, the uncertainty is the point.