They lie flat, toppled sometime around the 1880s by a treasure seeker who apparently believed, as many did with such monuments, that something valuable lay beneath. It is a quietly melancholy fate for stones that had endured several thousand years upright, and it raises the further puzzle of a third slab that was recorded as prostrate when the site was first properly examined in the modern era, but which has since disappeared entirely.

When the pair was described in 1842, both were substantial: the south-western stone measured nine and a half feet high, five feet broad, and a foot and a quarter thick; its north-eastern companion was eight and a half feet high and of similar width. These were not modest markers. Standing stones of this kind are broadly prehistoric in date, most likely erected during the Bronze Age as territorial, ceremonial, or astronomical indicators, and in Cork they often appear in pairs or short rows. When the antiquarian Bowman visited in 1934, he found all three slabs already prone and documented what the treasure hunter had done roughly fifty years before his arrival. Today only two stones remain visible, lying 1.7 metres apart in a fire-break cut through the surrounding forest. A possible stone row lies approximately 950 metres to the north-north-east, hinting that this corner of North Cork may once have held a more elaborate prehistoric landscape than the trees now allow a visitor to appreciate.