The sandstone boulder at Derreen in County Kerry measures just over two metres in length, nearly as wide, and less than a metre high, dimensions that suggest a broad, low, irregular slab rather than the tall upright finger of stone most people picture when they hear the term. Whether it was ever truly erected, or simply placed, or perhaps toppled at some point in its long history, is not entirely clear.

When the site was visited and recorded in 1985, the stone was lying prostrate in a small hollow on a south-east-facing slope in pasture. That posture, flat on the ground rather than upright, raises questions that the landscape itself cannot easily answer. Standing stones in Ireland were raised during the Bronze Age, broadly speaking, though the precise purpose of any individual example is rarely straightforward. Some marked boundaries, some may have had astronomical alignments, others are associated with burial or ritual activity that has left no surviving trace. A stone of this shape and size, irregular in form, relatively low even if upright, would have looked quite different from the slender pillars common elsewhere in Kerry, and its current or historical orientation adds another layer of ambiguity to a category of monument that is already difficult to interpret with confidence.