The stone is 2.25 metres tall, tapering to a point at its south-eastern end and sloping lower, to 1.75 metres, at the north-west. Its surface carries solution holes, the characteristic pitting that forms in limestone through long exposure to slightly acidic water, and it sits on or near the eastern edge of what was, in the nineteenth century, a racecourse.

The antiquarian T. J. Westropp, writing in 1906 and 1907, recorded the stone's local name as "Clochliagaun" and noted that the townland name Coad derives from the Irish Comfhod, meaning "equal length", a word that typically carries the sense of "tombstone". He proposed that the stone may once have served as a boundary marker for the lands of a medieval church, Coad church, which lies roughly 640 metres to the west. Westropp also documented a striking episode in the stone's more recent history: in 1854, a treasure-seeker from Kilnaboy apparently pulled it down in the hope of finding something buried beneath it. He found nothing, and the stone lay fallen for forty years. In 1894, fellow antiquarian George MacNamara and his brother took it upon themselves to re-erect it. When they did so, they too found no traces of burial at its base, which neither confirms nor dismisses the stone's prehistoric origins, only the persistent human tendency to assume that old stones must be guarding something.

The stone is oriented on a north-west to south-east axis and is set beside a slight hollow of about seven metres in diameter, though this hollow is not thought to be of any great age. The field wall built directly against it is a reminder that the stone has been absorbed into the working landscape around it, marked on maps, stumbled over, theorised about, and quietly incorporated into the boundaries of ordinary agricultural life.