It is an odd detail for what is otherwise a fairly conventional wayside memorial, and it sits alongside an inscribed plaque asking the Lord to have mercy on the souls of John Cornyn and his wife Mary McNamara, dated 1750. The whole structure, roughly cubic and just over a metre and a half on each side, stands on a circular rough stone plinth that fans out about half a metre beyond the monument's footprint on all sides, giving it an unexpectedly formal, almost ceremonial presence in the landscape.

A leacht cuimhne is a commemorative stone structure, typically erected as a focus for prayer or remembrance rather than as a grave marker in the conventional sense. The plaque here, recorded by the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp in the 1890s, carries its inscription in conjoined capitals in false relief, a lettering technique in which the characters appear raised but are actually cut into the surface to create that impression. Researchers have associated the monument with the Comyn family, and a stone head that once formed part of it was at some point removed to a holy well located about twenty metres to the south-east. Whether this happened during an act of piety, casual rearrangement, or deliberate relocation is not recorded. Earlier commentators suggested the monument sits atop a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone, but an inspection carried out in 1997 found only a low, grassed-over spread of spoil surrounding the base from the north-west to the south-east, roughly 0.3 to 0.4 metres high, with no confirmed prehistoric layer beneath.