It is not especially tall, not dramatically isolated, and not obviously signposted. What makes it worth pausing over is partly its position and partly a quiet numerical puzzle: the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1897 recorded three stones at this location, yet today the site is described around a single survivor.

Standing stones of this kind are a common enough feature of the Cork landscape, though their original purpose remains genuinely uncertain. Some are thought to mark boundaries, graves, or routeways; others may have had ceremonial or astronomical functions, with their orientations perhaps deliberately chosen in relation to sunrise or sunset at particular times of year. The alignment here, ENE to WSW, is consistent with that kind of intent, though nothing in the surviving record confirms it. The stone measures roughly 0.7 metres by 0.5 metres at its base, giving it a fairly solid, upright presence rather than the thin blade-like profile of some Cork examples. Whatever accompanied it on the 1897 map, whether two further standing stones or markers of a different kind, has either fallen, been removed, or simply gone unrecorded in more recent surveys.

The broader setting adds its own layer of interest. Hungry Hill, the highest point on the Beara Peninsula, takes a name said to derive from the Irish "Cnoc Daod", and the slopes here look southward over Bear Haven and Bear Island, a stretch of sheltered water that has its own long and sometimes turbulent history. The stone sits quietly in that landscape, pointing in a direction someone, at some point, considered worth recording.