The term, derived from the Irish "galán", simply means a standing stone or pillar, and it appears on old maps with the matter-of-fact plainness the Irish cartographic tradition reserves for things considered self-evident. What is less self-evident is the stone itself, a stout upright pillar 2.4 metres tall, oriented roughly ENE-WSW, with an unusual sharp inturn cut into its north-eastern face at a height of 1.45 metres from the ground. At that point the stone measures 1.05 metres by 0.8 metres. It is not a natural irregularity; the geometry is too deliberate for that.

The pillar sits 13.4 metres to the north-east of a boulder-burial, one of those low, table-like prehistoric monuments in which a large capstone rests directly on a boulder rather than on upright supports. That proximity is unlikely to be coincidental. Standing stones are frequently found in association with other prehistoric funerary or ritual monuments across Kerry, and the pairing here suggests the landscape around An Bhinn Bhán was arranged with some purpose during the Bronze Age, even if that purpose is no longer recoverable. At the base of the pillar, packing stones are still exposed, the smaller stones used to stabilise and wedge the upright when it was first erected, now visible after centuries of soil movement around them. The stone was documented by Ó Nualláin in 1978 and later included in A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan's archaeological survey of the peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996.