Most standing stones taper as they rise. The monolith at Cloghadda, near Gurteen in County Waterford, does the opposite: it widens towards the top, giving it an oddly top-heavy quality that makes the eye want to double-check what it is seeing. It is a small but persistent strangeness, the kind that tends to linger.

The stone is a monolith of Old Red Sandstone, the warm-toned sedimentary rock that underlies much of Munster and gives the landscape its particular reddish cast. It has a roughly rectangular cross-section measuring around 0.6 metres by 0.55 metres at the base, and it stands 2.9 metres tall. At the top, those dimensions broaden to approximately 1 metre by 0.7 metres, an inversion of the usual profile. It is oriented on an east-northeast to west-southwest axis, a directional alignment that recurs in prehistoric standing stones across Ireland, sometimes associated with solar or lunar observations, though no specific meaning can be confidently assigned here. The stone sits on the western shoulder of a northeast-southwest ridge, beside a laneway running through a coniferous forest, which gives the immediate surroundings a rather closed, filtered quality quite different from the open moorland or field settings where standing stones are more usually encountered.

The forest setting means the stone is not immediately visible from any distance, and the laneway approach gives the discovery of it something of an accidental quality, as though it had been quietly waiting at the side of a track for considerably longer than the trees around it, which is almost certainly true.