It was not placed to honour the dead or align with a solstice, as far as anyone can tell, but to guide travellers across a stretch of south Limerick countryside, one waymarker among many in a long, now largely invisible route.

The stone was catalogued in the early 1940s by archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly, who recorded it as Ballingoola No. 2, one of seven standing stones in the townland that he believed traced an old road running northward from Lough Gur Cross to the barony boundary. Beyond that boundary, in the barony of Clanwilliam, a further three stones continued the line. When O'Kelly examined the site in 1943, the stone itself was an irregularly shaped, well-weathered block of limestone, roughly 0.9 metres high, 1.2 metres long, and 0.6 metres thick. The road it once marked was, even then, almost entirely gone. A field just north of the stone had been ploughed in 1941, disturbing the track surface, but the ploughing also revealed something useful: a broad band of limestone chippings cutting across the darker soil, the physical ghost of a road that had otherwise vanished from the landscape.

Today, even the stone itself has effectively disappeared as a standing stone. No upright remains visible in the area shown on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map. What survives, according to a survey compiled by Caimin O'Brien and uploaded to the national record in 2018, is a boulder pushed into the east face of a hedgerow, most likely the same block O'Kelly recorded eight decades earlier, toppled and absorbed into the field boundary over the intervening years. For anyone visiting the area around Lough Gur, which lies just to the south and is itself extraordinarily rich in prehistoric monuments, Ballingoola repays attention less for what can be seen than for what the landscape is quietly concealing: the faint logic of a road that once connected places whose names and purposes are now largely forgotten.