The stone is a rectangular slab, roughly one and a half metres tall and not quite two feet wide, oriented along a northeast to southwest axis. It commands an extensive view to the north, which gives it the kind of presence that tends to invite grand interpretations. Yet the surface shows possible scratching, the sort of wear that cattle and sheep produce when they lean into a fixed object to relieve an itch.

Standing stones of this type are scattered across Cork and the wider Irish landscape, and their original purposes remain genuinely uncertain. Some were erected as boundary markers, others as ritual or commemorative monuments during the Bronze Age, and many have accumulated folklore that arrived long after the original intention was forgotten. The northeast to southwest alignment at Derrynasafagh is worth noting: such orientations sometimes correspond to solar or lunar events, though without excavation or associated finds it is impossible to say whether that was deliberate here. What can be said is that the stone was considered significant enough to be recorded formally in the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, a county-wide survey of West Cork published in 1992, which noted both its dimensions and the possibility that generations of animals have been using it for something rather more prosaic than ceremony.