[1] As it survives today, the site comprises a rough and highly damaged avenue of stones arranged over a mile, aligned northwest.

He said of Shap Avenue: “Though it's ourney be northward ... it makes a very large curve, or an arc of a circle, as those at Avebury, and passes over a brook too.

A spring likewise arises in it, near the Greyhound inn.” [3] Stukeley had earlier received a plan of the monument from a local antiquarian (now missing).

The measure of what are left extends a mile and a half, but without doubt a great deal of it has been demolished by the town, and by everything else thereabouts..."[4] Shap Stone Avenue sits near the centre of the Eden Valley, Cumbria.

Archaeologist Tom Clare[6] noted that the view to the east is restricted, that there may have been a tarn close to the site, and that the southern terminus of the lines of stones may have ended at a stream.

Notably, Moor Divock sits to the northwest, Gunnerkeld Stone Circle to the north, and Great Asby Scar to the south.

Most stones have been lost, some natural erratics may have been added to the monument in historical times, and the various early accounts of the setting by William Stukeley, Thomas Pennant, Lady Lonsdale, and George Hall are not easy to reconcile.

Instead, many appear to have parrotted the very earliest account of the avenue, in William Camden's Britannia, where the site took on the name 'Loder Stones', after the Lowther Family: "Here the river Eimet, flowing out of a great Lake and for a good space dividing this shire from Cumberland, receiveth the river Loder into it, nere unto the spring head whereof, hard by Shape, in times past Hepe, a little monastery built by Thomas the sonne of Gospatrick, sonne of Orms, there is a well or fountaine which after the manner of Euripus ebbeth and floweth many times in a day; also there be huge stones in forme of Pyramides, some 9 foote high and foureteene foot thicke, ranged directly as it were in a rowe for a mile in length, with equall distance almost betweene, which may seeme to have bin pitched and erected for to continue the memoriall of some act there atchieved, but what the same was, by injurie of time it is quite forgotten."

The painting, currently in possession of Askham Hall (as of 2024), shows Kemp Howe, with a tightly arranged avenue of stones trailing off it towards the northwest.

It appears to show the avenue crossing a stream, before disappearing into the distance towards the Greyhound Inn (still surviving today as a Grade II listed building).

Without Stukeley's plan of the site reemerging, the arrangement of the original stones north of the Greyhound Inn can no longer be determined (at least without excavation).

[13] The Goggleby Stone is about ten feet high and has a cup mark on its north face, and an artificial shallow depression above it.

[18] The remains of a quasi stone circle (grid reference NY567132) lie on the A6 road opposite the former petrol station close to a railway embankment.

Adam Morgan Ibbotson believed the site to have been similar to the megalithic stone circles of the region, notably Castlerigg, Swinside, and Long Meg.