It leans very slightly to the south-east, as if inclining towards the water below, and several packing stones remain visible at its base, the kind of careful propping that ancient builders used to keep a megalith upright in the ground. Standing stones are among the most common, and most stubbornly ambiguous, prehistoric monuments in Ireland: raised individually or in loose groupings, they date broadly to the Bronze Age, though their precise purpose in any given case is rarely recoverable. This one has quietly outlasted whatever occasion prompted someone to haul it upright thousands of years ago.

The stone is trapezoidal at the base, measuring roughly 1.2 metres by 0.28 metres along a north-east to south-west axis. Its sides taper smoothly upward to an uneven top, giving it a roughly regular silhouette that suggests some deliberate shaping, or at least the selection of a stone that already approximated the desired form. It abuts the southern side of an earthen field bank, one of those low, ancient boundaries that still divide the land across much of rural Ireland, and which may themselves preserve the outlines of prehistoric field systems. Whether the bank predates the stone, postdates it, or was raised in direct relation to it is the sort of question the landscape keeps to itself.