Most stone rows invite a kind of awe through scale, their tall uprights marching across open moorland. The example at Tooreen in County Waterford takes the opposite approach entirely. Stretching just 2.45 metres from end to end, it is a miniature of the form, three modest stones set in a line that a person could step across in a couple of paces. What it lacks in grandeur it compensates for in precision: the stones are arranged on a NE-SW alignment, each one a slightly different shape and height, the gaps between them measured and deliberate.

A stone row is broadly understood as a prehistoric monument in which three or more standing or set stones are placed in a deliberate linear arrangement, often associated with ritual or astronomical activity, though the exact purpose of most examples remains unresolved. At Tooreen, the three stones vary in form: the north-easternmost is triangular in plan and the lowest of the three, rising just 0.1 metres above ground; the central stone is rectangular and taller at 0.25 metres; and the south-western stone, also rectangular, is the largest, reaching 0.35 metres in height and measuring 0.5 metres in its longest dimension. The spacing between them, 0.72 metres from the south-western stone to the central one, and 0.57 metres from the central to the north-eastern, suggests a careful, considered placement rather than casual arrangement. The row sits on a col, a low saddle of ground between higher points, just south of a ring-barrow, a type of circular earthen burial mound ringed by a ditch, which implies this small corner of the Waterford landscape carried some significance to the people who shaped it in prehistory. The proximity of the two monuments to one another is unlikely to be coincidental.