These maps were, for their time, remarkably thorough in recording upright stones and prehistoric monuments across the Irish landscape, so an absence from both surveys suggests the stone was either overlooked by surveyors on two separate occasions, or that its significance simply did not register to those doing the recording. Whatever the reason, the stone at Gortavehy quietly escaped official notice for well over a century.

The stone itself stands 1.4 metres high and measures 1.2 metres by 0.56 metres at its base, rectangular in plan with its long axis running roughly north to south. It leans noticeably to the west, the kind of tilt that accumulates over centuries of ground movement and weather. It sits in open pasture on a north-east facing slope, and what makes its position particularly interesting is its proximity to a ringfort located just seven metres to the north. A ringfort, to use the broad definition, is a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built and used largely during the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, as a defended farmstead. The relationship between standing stones and ringforts is not unusual in the Cork landscape; sometimes the stone predates the enclosure by millennia, and the later builders simply settled near what was already a marked point in the land.