The stone now rises to about 1.22 metres, but according to a 1934 account by Bowman, it was originally over six feet tall before it slipped in its socket. Someone had dug a hole at its base hoping to find hidden treasure, a pursuit that was common enough around standing stones in Ireland, where folklore frequently associated such monuments with buried gold or offerings. The stone never fully recovered its original height.

The stone itself is quartzite, a subrectangular block measuring roughly 0.8 metres by 0.55 metres at its base, with its long axis oriented east-northeast to west-southwest. It sits near the top of the hill, in pasture, with open views to the north, south, and west. Curiously, it does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, which means it was either overlooked by the surveyors or had not yet been formally noted by the time that mapping work was carried out across the country. Standing stones as a category are among the most difficult prehistoric monuments to date precisely; they were erected across a broad span of prehistory, most commonly during the Bronze Age, and were likely used as boundary markers, ritual focal points, or astronomical alignments, though their specific purpose at any given site is rarely recoverable.

The commanding position of the stone, with its wide sightlines across the surrounding countryside, is the kind of detail that repays a visit on a clear day, when the logic of its placement, whatever that logic originally was, becomes at least imaginable.