It measures roughly 1.3 metres across and stands less than a metre high, partially collapsed, and it is one of at least five such cairns distributed across the landscape in a deliberate pattern. What gives it significance is not its size but its place in a system, a quietly purposeful arrangement of markers that once guided people through an act of religious devotion.

The cairn is the second from the eastern end of a roughly east-west line of four, each spaced between eleven and thirteen metres apart. A fifth sits offset to the south, about ninety metres away. Together, they appear to have functioned as waymarkers along a route leading westward towards a cluster of penitential stations in the neighbouring townland of Termon, roughly 400 metres distant. Penitential stations, in this context, are fixed points along a prescribed devotional path where pilgrims would stop to pray, often walking barefoot and reciting specific prayers at each halt. The Termon stations surround a holy well recorded on the 1915 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map under the name Tobernafiaghanta. The cairns in Coskeam, then, are not the destination but the approach, small stone accumulations that accumulated meaning with every generation of pilgrims who added a stone or simply passed by.

The view north across the valley from this low-lying ground is broad and open, which may have made the route easier to follow in an era before signage, the cairns visible against the sky as pilgrims moved west towards the well and its surrounding stations.