The carvings are easy to miss: weathered and faint, pressed into a sub-rectangular surface little under a metre across, they consist of simple cupmarks, small circular depressions ground into the rock, alongside cup-and-ring motifs, where a central cup is surrounded by one or more concentric carved rings. One of these rings is penannular, meaning the circle is incomplete, deliberately left open rather than closed. The boulder is not alone. It sits within a cluster of six decorated stones occupying a compact area of hillside measuring roughly 16 metres by 8 metres, with a second carved outcrop recorded just half a metre to the north-east.

Rock art of this type is found widely across the Iveragh Peninsula and is generally understood to date to the later Neolithic or early Bronze Age, though its precise meaning and function remain genuinely unresolved. The Derrynablaha examples were noted by the researcher Emmanuel Anati in 1963 and again by Finlay a decade later, and the site was subsequently included in the archaeological survey of south Kerry compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996. The setting itself offers some context: the slope overlooks the Kealduff River valley, with a tributary stream running to the south-west and Lough Brin lying to the east. Whether that landscape orientation was incidental or deliberate is another of the questions the stones leave open.

The rough, unfractured sandstone here has resisted the kind of weathering that destroys softer rock surfaces, which is why the carvings survive at all, even in their current faint condition. Visitors approaching across the stony heath pasture should be prepared for low, unobtrusive stones; none of these boulders rises more than half a metre above the ground, and the decorated surfaces can look like ordinary rock until the light catches them at an oblique angle, which tends to make the carved lines and depressions considerably easier to read.