This particular standing stone at Shanakill, in mid Cork, falls into the latter category. Set into pasture on a south-west-facing slope, it is a modest presence by any measure, standing just 0.9 metres high and measuring 1.6 metres by 0.33 metres at its base, with a subrectangular plan and its long axis oriented roughly west-northwest to east-southeast.

Standing stones are among the most enigmatic of Irish prehistoric monuments. Erected most commonly during the Bronze Age, they served purposes that remain genuinely uncertain, variously interpreted as boundary markers, solar or lunar alignments, or memorials for the dead. The Shanakill stone's orientation along a WNW-ESE axis may or may not be meaningful in that regard; without excavation, it is impossible to say. What is clear is that it was already absent from the six-inch Ordnance Survey maps of both 1842 and 1904, meaning it either escaped the attention of nineteenth-century surveyors entirely or was not considered worthy of note at the time. Its existence in the archaeological record therefore depends on later fieldwork rather than on those foundational surveys that documented so much else across the Irish countryside.