Whether it was ever truly upright is now a matter of careful qualification: it may be a standing stone, the record notes, but it has been removed from its original position, and that single word, removed, carries a kind of quiet melancholy. A prehistoric monument reduced to a conditional.

The stone sits approximately seventy metres south-east of a stone row, a type of prehistoric monument in which two or more upright stones are set in a deliberate linear arrangement, and the proximity of these two features to one another is the most suggestive thing about the Tullig stone. Stone rows and standing stones are frequently found in association across Cork and Kerry, forming part of a wider ceremonial or territorial landscape whose original purposes remain genuinely uncertain. At two metres in length and measuring sixty-five by forty centimetres across, this is not a small stone; it would have been a significant undertaking to raise it, and presumably a deliberate decision, at some point in the intervening centuries, to take it down. The stone is subject to a preservation order under the National Monuments Acts, which means it has legal protection in spite of, or perhaps because of, its uncertain and displaced condition.