It stands just 1.1 metres tall, a modest presence compared to the great monoliths of more celebrated prehistoric landscapes, yet its survival in such an ordinary, inhabited setting gives it a particular kind of interest.

The stone is quartzite, a hard metamorphic rock that would have made it conspicuous in the landscape when first erected, since quartzite catches light in a way that duller sandstones or limestones do not. Its shape in plan is subrectangular, meaning roughly rectangular but without sharp, regular corners, and it measures 1.21 metres by 0.7 metres at its base. Its long axis runs ENE to WSW, an orientation that may or may not have held astronomical or ritual significance for the people who put it in place, though without further excavation or survey work such interpretations remain speculative. Standing stones of this kind are broadly prehistoric in date, most commonly associated with the Bronze Age in Ireland, and were sometimes erected as boundary markers, memorial stones, or components of wider ceremonial landscapes. What this particular stone was meant to do, nobody now knows.