It leans noticeably to the east, its pointed top giving it an almost accidental quality, as though it were simply the most prominent member of the local geology rather than something deliberately placed. At just over a metre high and irregular in outline, it is not a commanding monument by any measure, yet it has been there long enough, and purposefully enough, to belong to a tradition of prehistoric standing stones that punctuate the Cork landscape in ways that still resist straightforward explanation.

The stone's absence from both the 1842 and 1904 six-inch Ordnance Survey maps is itself a small puzzle, since many far less distinctive features were diligently recorded by the Survey's fieldworkers. Its long axis runs roughly north to south, and it sits in rough grazing land, the kind of marginal ground that often preserves prehistoric features precisely because it was never worth the trouble of clearing or ploughing. What gives the site an additional layer of interest is a note made by a researcher named Broker in 1937, who recorded a possible stone circle in the same vicinity. Stone circles, of which Cork has an unusually high concentration, are typically Bronze Age monuments, rings of upright stones often associated with ritual or astronomical observation. Whether the Lackdotia stone was ever part of such a wider arrangement, or simply stood alone in its field for four thousand years, remains an open question.