The row stretches just 2.7 metres from end to end, which makes it easy to underestimate. These are not the towering monoliths of popular imagination, but something quieter and more precise: three carefully placed uprights, each slightly taller than the last as you move south-westward, the tallest reaching 1.45 metres.

Stone rows, a prehistoric monument type found with particular frequency across the Cork and Kerry uplands, are alignments of standing stones set in a straight line. Their purpose remains genuinely uncertain, though orientations toward solar or lunar events have been proposed. The Canrooska example is oriented ENE to WSW, and what makes its setting especially interesting is that it sits roughly 100 metres south-east of a second stone row on the same plateau, suggesting this remote mountain shoulder was considered significant enough to warrant more than one such structure. The measurements recorded by archaeologist Seán Ó Nualláin in 1988 capture the row's gradual increase in height: the north-easternmost stone stands just over a metre tall, the middle stone reaches 1.35 metres, and the tallest, at the south-western end, tops out at 1.45 metres. Whether this graduated arrangement was intentional or is a consequence of how the stones have settled over millennia is impossible to say with certainty.