What makes it quietly peculiar, beyond the usual strangeness of prehistoric standing stones, is a detail at its base: a shallow depression worn into the ground all the way around it, not by ritual or ceremony, but by generations of cattle using the stone as a scratching post. The monument has outlasted whatever purpose first prompted someone to haul it upright, and is now, among other things, a convenience for livestock.

The stone itself is a roughly tapering limestone slab, 1.43 metres tall and 1.1 metres wide at the base, set with its long axis running NNE to SSW. A right-angled vertical fracture runs the full height of the WNW face, giving the stone an L-shaped cross-section when viewed from above and causing an abrupt narrowing at its SSW end. The sides and top are naturally rough and corrugated, though the SE face is comparatively smooth. It tilts slightly to the WNW. The elevation on which it sits is a level, north-to-south ridge, and the ground drops away gently northward for about 140 metres to the lakeshore. The placement was not accidental: from this spot, Croagh Patrick is visible to the NNW and the peak of Nephin to the north, with the Partry Mountains closing off the western horizon and the mountains of Connemara rising to the south-west. Whether or not the stone's builders were consciously framing these landmarks is impossible to say, but the alignment of the stone and the panorama it overlooks suggest the location was chosen with some care. The site was pasture until December 2016, when it was converted to forestry, which will gradually alter how the stone sits within its surroundings and how much of that wide mountain skyline remains visible from beside it.