They do not appear on the Ordnance Survey map, they have no recorded name, and they are made of conglomerate rock in a landscape where every natural outcrop is limestone. That last detail is the quietly unsettling part: the stones do not belong to the geology around them, which means somebody, at some point, brought them here.

The first detailed description comes from 1912, when Bertram Windle recorded both stones in the context of the nearby Giants' Graves, a pair of megalithic monuments on the same hillside. A gallaun, to use the Irish term, is simply a standing stone set upright in the earth as a deliberate prehistoric marker, and Windle was fairly certain both blocks qualified. He measured the northern one at roughly two metres long, 1.2 metres wide, and one metre high, and noted that the compass bearing between the two stones runs at 210 degrees, with a right-angle alignment of 320 degrees. Whether those orientations meant anything to their original builders remains unknown. By 1944, the archaeologist O'Kelly was more sceptical, suggesting the stones looked less like intentional monuments and more like glacial erratics, the boulders carried and deposited by retreating ice sheets thousands of years ago, which would explain the incongruous rock type without requiring any human agency at all. The question has not been definitively settled since.

The site sits on the northern side of Killalough Hill, with the eastern shoreline of Lough Gur lying roughly 270 metres to the west. A second standing stone recorded separately sits about 50 metres to the south-south-east on the hill's summit. The area around Lough Gur is exceptionally dense with prehistoric remains, so the two stones are easy to pass over in favour of more obviously dramatic monuments nearby. They are low and rounded rather than tall and pointed, which is part of why the debate about their origins persists. Visiting in clear conditions makes it easier to appreciate the broader landscape alignment and to spot the geological difference between the conglomerate blocks and the pale limestone that breaks through the hillside around them.