It stands 1.6 metres tall, its face measuring 1.8 metres by 0.7 metres, which makes it a fairly substantial presence in an otherwise ordinary field. What gives it its quiet peculiarity is not its size but its deliberateness: someone, at some point far enough back that no record of them survives, chose this particular hillside, this particular orientation, and set this stone into the ground with evident intention.

Standing stones of this kind are scattered across West Cork and the broader Irish landscape, and they remain among the more enigmatic categories of field monument. Without associated burial evidence or inscriptions, their original purpose can rarely be pinned down. Some were erected during the Bronze Age as boundary markers, commemorative stones, or elements of a ritual landscape; others may be considerably earlier or later. The precise alignment of the Cloonygorman stone, running east-northeast to west-southwest, has the feel of something considered rather than incidental, though what governed that choice, astronomical, territorial, or otherwise, is not recorded. The stone itself is described as rectangular, suggesting either a naturally regular piece of local geology or one that was shaped before being raised.