One of them has fallen, lying flat beside its neighbours, and the whole row runs on a NNE-SSW axis with a precision that feels deliberate even now. Stone rows of this kind, found widely across Cork and Kerry, are among the less-understood monuments of later Irish prehistory; their alignment with solar or lunar events has been proposed but never conclusively settled, and their original purpose remains genuinely open.

The stones themselves vary considerably in size. The tallest, at the south-west end of the row, stands 2.4 metres high and is the most imposing of the group, while the northernmost stone reaches 1.75 metres. The two middle stones stand close together, only 0.2 metres apart, with one now prostrate on the ground at 1.95 metres in length. At some point, probably during agricultural improvements to the surrounding land, the stones were incorporated into field fences, a fate that befell many prehistoric monuments across Ireland as farmers made practical use of whatever stone lay to hand. The land has since been reclaimed and a dump of cleared field stones piled along the north-west side of the row, which slightly obscures the setting but leaves the alignment itself legible. Roughly 200 metres to the south-west, a five-stone circle survives in the same landscape, a type of monument particular to the south-west of Ireland in which four upright stones flank a recumbent, or horizontally placed, slab. The proximity of the two monuments suggests this corner of Leadawillin was a place of some significance in the prehistoric period, even if the nature of that significance is now lost.