Locals have long called it 'The Giant's Lift', a title that carries the kind of folkloric weight these stones tend to attract, the sense that no ordinary human agency could have placed it there. At 1.2 metres tall with a girth of 2.6 metres, it is broad and solid rather than imposing, and its surface is marked with irregular grooves whose origins are not explained by the documentary record.

Standing stones of this kind are among the most enigmatic monument types in the Irish landscape. They were erected during prehistory, most commonly in the Bronze Age, and their precise purposes remain genuinely unclear; theories range from territorial markers to sites of ritual significance to aids in astronomical observation. What makes the Tombeagh stone locally distinctive is less its scale than its personality, that name passed down through generations of people who looked at a heavy block of granite and decided a giant must have set it down mid-carry. The grooves on its surface add a further layer of quiet strangeness. Whether they are the result of deliberate working, natural weathering of the granite, or some later use of the stone as a sharpening surface is the sort of question that tends not to get resolved.