The stone at Bawnmore is subrectangular in plan, meaning roughly rectangular with softened, irregular edges rather than the clean geometry of a dressed block. It measures 1.6 metres across and 0.45 metres thick, and its long axis runs northeast to southwest, aligned with the field fence in which it now stands.

Standing stones of this type are scattered across Cork and the wider Irish countryside, and most date to the Bronze Age, though pinning an exact date or purpose to any individual example is rarely straightforward. They have been interpreted variously as boundary markers, ritual monuments, and indicators of burial sites nearby, and the honest answer is that the evidence differs from site to site. What gives the Bawnmore stone a small cartographic footnote is the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which placed it in the wrong field entirely, locating it in the ground to the west of where it actually stands. Such errors crept into early OS mapping for various reasons, including the difficulty of accurately recording features in enclosed farmland, and the Bawnmore stone's misplacement went uncorrected on that sheet. The stone itself, of course, did not move.