Yet the standing stone at Coolineagh has been there long enough that the plough simply works around it, season after season, on an east-facing slope where it has probably stood since prehistory. It measures one and a half metres in height, roughly a metre wide and just over half a metre deep, and its plan is subrectangular, meaning it has been shaped or selected for something approaching a rectangular outline rather than being a raw irregular boulder. Its long axis runs northeast to southwest, an orientation that recurs often enough among Irish standing stones to suggest it was deliberate, though whether that reflects astronomical, territorial, or ritual thinking remains genuinely unresolved.

Standing stones as a category are among the most quietly persistent features of the Irish landscape. They date most commonly to the Bronze Age, though some may be earlier or later, and their original purposes are rarely recoverable with any certainty. They have been interpreted variously as boundary markers, memorial stones, route indicators, and components of ceremonial landscapes. What can be said of the Coolineagh example is that it survived the clearance and cultivation of the land around it, which is itself a form of evidence: someone, at some point in every generation since it was raised, chose not to remove it.