The stone measures roughly two metres by just over a metre, and is about eighty centimetres thick. This is a boulder-burial, a prehistoric monument type found mainly in Cork and Kerry, in which a substantial boulder is raised on smaller upright stones to create a low, dolmen-like structure thought to mark a place of burial or ritual significance. The qualifier here, though, is that this particular boulder may have shifted from its original position over the centuries, which complicates any reading of its orientation or intent.

What makes the Ballymichael site more than a single curiosity is the cluster of related monuments in its immediate neighbourhood. An anomalous stone group sits only 5.5 metres to the south, close enough to suggest some deliberate spatial relationship, though what exactly that relationship meant to the people who arranged these stones is not recorded. Further out, roughly 280 metres to the south-east, stand both a radial-stone cairn and a second boulder-burial. A radial-stone cairn is a circular mound of stones with upright slabs arranged outward from the centre like spokes, a form associated with Bronze Age funerary practice in Munster. The proximity of these monuments to one another points to a landscape that was, at some point in prehistory, purposefully marked and returned to, a ridge line above the Lee that carried meaning well before anyone thought to write anything down.