That the stone at Coolyhane in County Cork was absent from both the 1842 and 1904 six-inch surveys does not mean it was unknown locally, but it does suggest that whoever was mapping the landscape on each occasion either overlooked it or decided it did not merit marking. It has since been absorbed into a field boundary, sitting on the north side of a lane and incorporated into a stone wall, which may help explain its invisibility to earlier surveyors: a prehistoric upright that has been built around, leaned against, and gradually enrolled into a later agricultural structure can easily read, from a distance, as just another large wall stone.

The stone itself is subrectangular in plan, meaning its cross-section is roughly rectangular with slightly irregular edges, and it stands 1.15 metres above ground, measuring 0.89 metres by 0.42 metres at its face. Its long axis runs northeast to southwest, an orientation that may or may not be intentional but is common enough among standing stones in Munster to have attracted scholarly attention over the years. Standing stones as a class are among the most difficult prehistoric monuments to date or interpret with confidence: they were erected across a broad sweep of prehistory, used as boundary markers, ritual focal points, or memorials, and often accumulated later meanings and associations long after their original purpose was forgotten. Whatever brought this particular stone to its spot in Coolyhane, it has outlasted the cartographers who twice failed to notice it.