Standing stones, erected across Ireland from the Neolithic through the early medieval period, were set into the ground for purposes that remain largely unresolved: boundary markers, ritual foci, commemorative posts, or something else entirely. This particular one has a slightly shouldered profile, narrowing from 0.7 metres wide at its base to 0.55 metres at the top, which gives it an almost architectural quality, as though shaped with some care rather than simply hauled upright. Around its base, a few small stones cluster, and the ground is worn into a shallow depression, the modest legacy of generations of farm animals using the pillar as a scratching post.

For all its prominence on the knoll, the stone was not recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1837, the great nineteenth-century cartographic sweep of Ireland that documented ruins, raths, and antiquities across the country. It appears only on the 1930 edition, simply labelled "Standing Stone". Whether it was overlooked by the earlier surveyors, or whether local knowledge of it had faded and then revived, is unclear. The site itself seems deliberately chosen for visibility: to the west, the land drops away into the valley of the River Moy, and to the south-west, on clear days, the bulk of Nephin and the Nephin Beg mountain range sits on the horizon. A spring or area of wet ground lies at the base of the slope to the south-west, a detail worth noting because water sources are frequently associated with prehistoric monument placement across Ireland.