What makes the situation at Killeacle stranger still is that the stone appears to sit at the centre of a ring barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument in which a burial mound or focal point is encircled by a shallow ditch and an earthen bank, and that a slab-lined grave was discovered barely eighty yards away during ordinary roadworks in the nineteenth century. The two features together suggest a landscape that was once, in some organised and deliberate way, arranged around the dead.

The account comes from Lynch, writing in 1892, who recorded the testimony of a local farmer, B. M'Elligott, employed in widening an old road near the gallaun, the Irish term for a standing stone or pillar stone. About two feet below the surface and just three feet from the road's edge, M'Elligott found thin limestone flags covering a small flag-lined grave, roughly two feet wide and two feet long, oriented east to west. The gallaun itself is made not of local limestone but of whinstone, a hard dark rock, and Lynch calculated it must have been transported from the cliffs near Kerry Head, roughly nine miles away, where such stone occurs in abundance. It stands 2.4 metres above ground, nearly a metre wide, and is surrounded by a shallow trench and embankment forming a circle about 36 metres in diameter. Lynch connected the townland name, Ardconnel, meaning the height of Conal, with Ardconail mentioned in the medieval Book of Rights as one of the Portaibh, or royal seats, of the Kings of Cashel. He speculated that the pillar stone might mark the grave of a chieftain named Conal, whose identity has otherwise left no trace in history or legend. The limestone ridge on which it stands runs east to west for several miles through the plains of Clanmaurice, and the stone crowns its highest point, which would explain why it commanded such a wide horizon. What it was meant to announce to that horizon, no surviving source says.