That spare designation, recorded on the six-inch map produced during one of the most systematic geographical surveys Ireland has ever seen, tells you something about how the stone must have struck those who encountered it: present, obvious, and not obviously explainable.

The stone itself is an irregular slab of conglomerate, a rock type formed from older fragments cemented together over geological time, and this particular example combines pink granite and white quartz in a way that would make it visually distinctive even in a landscape not short of interesting geology. It stands 1.55 metres high, 1.1 metres wide, and 0.5 metres thick, and is oriented along a northeast-southwest alignment, a directional choice common to many prehistoric standing stones across Ireland, though what specific purpose or meaning that alignment carried here remains, as with most such monuments, a matter of educated guesswork. The Slieve Aughty mountains straddle the Galway and Clare border, a relatively quiet upland area of blanket bog and rough pasture, and Knockauncarragh sits within that broader landscape of scattered, under-visited antiquity.