Rather than marking a burial, a boundary in the conventional sense, or a place of ritual significance, this small block of weathered limestone appears to have served as a waymarker, one of a series of stones that once lined an ancient road running northward through the County Limerick countryside near Lough Gur.

The stone was catalogued in the early 1940s by archaeologist M.J. O'Kelly, who recorded it as Ballingoola No. 3, the third in a sequence of seven standing stones within the townland alone. Writing in 1942 to 1943, O'Kelly described it as an irregularly shaped block of well-weathered limestone, measuring roughly 0.68 metres high, 0.71 metres wide, and 0.45 metres thick. Unremarkable dimensions, perhaps, but O'Kelly's wider survey revealed something more compelling: these stones seemed to trace the line of an ancient road or track running from Lough Gur Cross northward to the barony boundary, where a further three stones continued the alignment into the neighbouring barony of Clanwilliam. A barony, worth noting, was a subdivision of an Irish county used historically for administrative purposes. The road itself had largely vanished by O'Kelly's time, but a short stretch remained visible in the townland of Ballingoola, connecting stones No. 2 and No. 3. When a field just north of stone No. 2 was ploughed in 1941, the disturbance revealed the track's surface as a broad band of limestone chippings cutting across the darker surrounding soil, a fleeting glimpse of the road's original construction.

The stone today is broken into three sections. The base remains set into the ground as it presumably has been for centuries, but the two upper portions now lie on the surface beside it. Visitors to the area around Ballingoola townland, which sits in the wider landscape of Lough Gur, one of Ireland's most archaeologically dense regions, should not expect a dramatic monument. What they will find instead is a quiet fragment of a larger system, a single point on a line that once guided people across this part of Limerick, its companions still scattered across the fields if you know where to look.