This particular example sits in pasture on an east-facing slope, just over a metre tall and roughly square in cross-section, measuring 0.44 metres by 0.4 metres at its base. Its plan is irregular rather than neatly dressed, and its long axis runs northwest to southeast, a alignment that may or may not be intentional but that prehistorians have noted repeatedly across similar monuments.

Standing stones, sometimes called galláns in Irish, were erected across Ireland and Britain from the Neolithic period through the Bronze Age, a span of roughly five thousand years. Their precise purposes remain debated: some appear to mark boundaries or routeways, others seem to be associated with burial sites or ritual landscapes, and a number show astronomical alignments. Most cannot be dated without excavation, and many have lost whatever surrounding context, earthworks, associated finds, or companion stones, that might once have explained them. The Kilpatrick stone, modest in height and unadorned, fits this pattern of quiet ambiguity. It is recorded in the archaeological inventory of mid Cork, which catalogued dozens of such monuments scattered across the county's farmland and hillsides.