It is roughly a metre tall and a metre long, oriented east to west, and it has a circular hole, about ten centimetres across, bored clean through its southern edge. That perforation is the thing. Locals have long called it the Toll Stone, a name that carries its own quiet implication, as if passage or payment or some form of ritual acknowledgement was once expected of those who came near it.

Standing stones are among the more enigmatic survivals of prehistoric Ireland, erected across a span of thousands of years for purposes that varied, it seems, from burial markers to boundary indicators to sites of assembly or ceremony. This particular example is unusual for the deliberate perforation, a feature seen on a small number of Irish standing stones and sometimes associated with oath-taking or healing traditions in folk memory, though what meaning it originally held here is unknown. What is also notable is its absence from the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1842 and 1905, which suggests it was either overlooked by surveyors or not considered significant at those times, despite its apparent antiquity. It stands within the grounds of Doneraile Court, a Georgian house and estate in County Cork with a long and layered history of its own, which means the stone has spent at least part of its life as a feature of a designed landscape rather than open countryside.