It stands 1.2 metres tall, roughly 0.7 metres wide and 0.5 metres deep, and its form is subrectangular in plan, meaning it has something close to a rectangular cross-section rather than a simple rounded or irregular profile. What gives it a particular quality is the deliberate orientation of its long axis along an east-northeast to west-southwest line, a alignment that recurs across many standing stones in Ireland and is thought by some researchers to relate to solar or lunar events, though no specific interpretation can be pinned to this stone alone.

Standing stones of this kind are among the most numerous and least understood monuments in the Irish landscape. Erected during the Bronze Age in most cases, though some may be Neolithic, they served purposes that remain genuinely uncertain: boundary markers, ritual focal points, memorial stones, or astronomical indicators, perhaps all of these at different times or in different places. The Ballyvouskill example is a modest specimen by any measure, but its survival in open pasture, where agricultural activity has cleared or toppled countless others, gives it a quiet significance.