The Ardgroom stone circle, sometimes called Canfea after its townland, stands about a mile east of the village, off the old Kenmare road. Eleven stones form the original ring; nine of them are still upright, an outlier stands a short distance away in what archaeologists call an alignment position. The circle is unusual for a feature its members notice immediately: the stones taper toward points, like worn fangs set into the hillside. Most Beara circles use blockier, flatter slabs. The taper at Ardgroom may be deliberate, or it may simply reflect the local stone, but in late afternoon light, when the sun rakes the ring from the west, it gives the whole structure a sharper silhouette than most of its cousins.

Stone circles on the Beara peninsula belong, in the broadest sense, to the same Bronze Age tradition that runs across Ireland and Britain. They were almost certainly not pure observatories, although some appear oriented to solstice sunrises or moon-sets. They were almost certainly not pure temples, although ritual was part of their use. The best modern guess is that they served local communities as gathering places, calendar markers, and signs of ownership of the surrounding land, with the religious and the practical wound up together in ways modern eyes find hard to separate. The Ardgroom circle's outlier stone, set apart from the main ring, may have functioned as a foresight; a sunrise sighted across it would hit a particular point on the visible hill ridge at a particular date. Whether anyone took that sighting any more, no one knows.

About a mile northeast of the main circle lie the remains of another, less complete stone circle. There are at least two ring forts in the immediate vicinity, plus a scatter of standing stones and short stone rows. The Beara peninsula is one of the densest archaeological landscapes in Ireland, a place where every kilometre of country lane seems to pass a megalithic monument of some sort. Most of them are unsignposted; you find them by knowing where to look or by trusting a local who points across a fence and says, 'That one, over there.' A village of Ardgroom's size, with one shop, a post office, a petrol pump, and one pub called The Village Inn, sits at the centre of more prehistory than any of its residents will ever finish exploring.

Ardgroom looks out across the Kenmare River, a long sea inlet rather than a true river, with the mountains of the Iveragh Peninsula rising on the far shore. To the south the land climbs into the Slieve Miskish range; to the west the Beara peninsula narrows toward Eyeries and eventually Dursey Island and the open Atlantic. The village pub is the social centre, the post office handles a lot of conversation as well as letters, and the petrol station serves the kind of farming community that still moves cattle along narrow roads and still pulls trout from Glenbeg Lough. The stone circle, eleven tapered stones in a quiet field, is older than every other thing in the parish, and it is treated with the casual respect such a thing is owed in a country where deep time is part of the view.