This is a wayside cairn of the informal, cumulative kind: not a monument built in a single act, but one that has grown incrementally as travellers passing through the hill-pass have paused to add a pebble or a fist-sized stone to the collection already there. The boulder itself is substantial, measuring roughly 2.6 metres east to west and standing about 1.5 metres high, but it is the southern face and the flat upper surface that draw the eye, both packed with small stones placed with evident deliberateness.

The practice of adding a stone to a cairn or significant rock at a threshold point in a journey is deeply rooted in Irish and wider European tradition. Such gestures are associated with a range of intentions, from marking passage through a liminal point in the landscape to older apotropaic customs, the idea that leaving something behind might offer protection or propitiation for the road ahead. A hill-pass, where a track climbs from the coast and drops into a sheltered valley to the south, is precisely the kind of transitional place where these habits tend to accumulate. The trackway here, described as well-worn, suggests long and repeated use, and the sheer quantity of placed stones implies that the habit of pausing at this boulder is not a recent invention.

The boulder sits on the western side of the path as it rises from the coast road. Visitors approaching from that direction should look to their left once the ground begins to climb; the southern face of the rock, studded with lodged stones, is the clearest indication that this is the spot. The smallest contributions are little more than pebbles, wedged wherever a gap in the rock surface will hold them, while larger stones rest more openly on top.