Originally around 2.30 metres tall and aligned north to south when it stood upright, the stone was a substantial rectangular monolith, tapering towards the top. Now the larger upper section lies alongside the smaller lower portion, each fragment still roughly rectangular in cross-section and wide enough to suggest the stone once made a genuine impression on the landscape. What is quietly odd about it is that, despite its size and evident age, it does not appear on either of the first two editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, meaning that by the nineteenth century, at the latest, it had already been edited out of the official picture of the place.

The elevated position in an otherwise flat field is the kind of detail that tends to accumulate folklore, and it has done so here. Writing in 1883, a historian named Comerford recorded that local people believed a church site had once existed in the vicinity of the stone. That tradition is worth pausing on. Standing stones are prehistoric monuments, typically raised during the Bronze Age, but they were sometimes later absorbed into the mythologies of early Christian Ireland, their original purposes forgotten and replaced with new meanings. Whether the Barrysbrook stone genuinely stands near the site of an early ecclesiastical foundation, or whether it simply occupied high, noticeable ground that invited such associations, is not known. No church remains have been recorded here. The tradition survives only in Comerford's brief note, passed on from local memory.