That shift matters, because standing stones were rarely set up arbitrarily. This one is thought to have originally marked a burial ground, and the ground beneath it may now hold no record of what it once indicated.

The stone itself is substantial, rising to 2.25 metres in height and roughly half a metre thick, and it appears on Ordnance Survey maps from both 1841 to 1842 and 1898 under the name "Gallaun", an Anglicisation of the Irish word "gallán", meaning a standing stone or pillar. On its east and west faces there are markings that may be ogham, the early medieval alphabet used in Ireland and parts of Britain in which letters are represented by notches and strokes cut along a central line, typically along the edge of a stone. Whether these markings are genuinely ogham or simply the result of weathering and handling has not been conclusively established. A further curiosity was recorded in the Kerry Field Club Notes of 1943: a small hole, roughly an inch in diameter, at the base of the stone. No trace of it can be found today, which raises the question of whether it was lost in the relocation, obscured over time, or perhaps never quite what it appeared to be.