They were not. The stones, thin and pale, are aligned north-east to south-west, and the fact that a farmer at some point simply built around them rather than removed them says something about how deeply these kinds of markers embed themselves into a working landscape over time.

The two slabs stand close in height, the northern stone reaching 1.2 metres and the southern 1.25 metres. Whether they were originally erected as a true pair is not entirely certain. The southern stone may not be in situ, meaning it could have been shifted at some point from its original position, which complicates any attempt to read the alignment as intentional. Quartz was a material with clear symbolic or ritual significance in prehistoric Ireland, appearing repeatedly at burial monuments and ceremonial sites, so its use here is worth noting even if the precise purpose of the pair remains unresolved. Adding further depth to the hill is the presence of a pre-bog field system on the same slope, a network of ancient boundaries and enclosures that became sealed beneath peat over millennia. Such systems offer some of the clearest evidence available for how people organised and farmed the land before the bog took hold, and their survival at Ballynew places the standing stones within a broader prehistoric landscape rather than as an isolated curiosity.