It has been doing so for an unknown number of centuries, and in that time the animals have made their own use of it: the edges are polished smooth from repeated rubbing, and the ground around its base has been worn into a slight hollow. Whatever ceremonial or territorial purpose the stone may once have served, it has long since been repurposed, quite informally, as a scratching post.

The stone is rectangular in plan, tapering slightly towards its flat top, and oriented with its long axis running northwest to southeast. It measures 1.35 metres in height, 0.72 metres across, and 0.38 metres thick, narrowing to just 0.07 metres at the crown. Standing stones of this kind are found across Ireland and are generally thought to date from the Bronze Age or earlier, though the precise function of any individual example is rarely certain. What adds a little more texture to this particular location is the presence, roughly 100 metres to the southwest, of a possible cashel, which is a dry-stone enclosure typically associated with early medieval settlement and farming. Whether the two features are related in any meaningful way is an open question, but their proximity gives the site a layered quality that goes beyond a single upright slab in a pasture.