The small stone mound, roughly 1.3 metres across and still standing to about 0.8 metres despite its collapse, is the easternmost of a line of four such cairns arranged along an east-west axis, each separated from the next by around 11 to 13 metres. A fifth cairn sits apart from the line, offset to the south by roughly 90 metres. Together they suggest an organised landscape of devotion rather than anything accidental.

Penitential cairns of this kind typically functioned as waymarkers or stations along a prescribed route of prayer and physical penance, where pilgrims might stop to pray, kneel, or circle the mound a set number of times. The spacing and alignment of the Coskeam cairns point westward, and they appear to have served as a processional approach toward a more elaborate complex of penitential stations in the neighbouring townland of Termon, some 400 metres to the west-southwest. That cluster of stations surrounds a holy well, recorded on the 1915 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map under the name Tobernafiaghanta. The Termon townland name is itself significant: "termon" derives from the Latin terminus and in Irish ecclesiastical usage denoted sanctuary land associated with a church or religious site, land that enjoyed a degree of legal protection. The well and its surrounding stations therefore almost certainly have roots in an older devotional tradition, with the Coskeam cairns serving to guide pilgrims across the valley toward it.

The cairn sits on low ground that opens northward into a wide view across the valley, which gives the site an orientation as much practical as spiritual. The line of cairns would have been visible across open ground, functioning less as monuments to contemplate and more as a path to follow.