A vertical split runs through the monolith, cleaving it so completely that the two faces seem to lean slightly apart from each other, like companions who have had a falling out but not yet moved away. It is only on closer inspection that the shared base and the continuous grain of the stone give the game away.

The stone stands just over a metre tall and is aligned on a northwest to southeast axis, a directional preference shared by many prehistoric standing stones across Ireland and Atlantic Europe, though what that orientation meant to the people who set it upright is not recorded anywhere. It sits on a north-facing slope in grazing land, modest in scale, measuring roughly 65 centimetres by 30 centimetres in cross-section. Standing stones as a class are among the more enigmatic monuments in the Irish landscape; they appear across thousands of years of prehistory and may have served as boundary markers, ritual focal points, or commemorative posts, and often the specific purpose of any individual example is simply unknown. This one in Maunvough adds to that ambiguity the extra puzzle of its fractured form, which raises the question of whether the split is ancient weathering, the result of frost or ground movement over millennia, or something that happened more recently.