Ordnance Survey maps from both 1846 and 1894 label it a "Cromlech", which ordinarily refers to a megalithic tomb or dolmen. But this is simply a standing stone, roughly a metre in height and less than half a metre wide, set near the centre of a ringfort called Cathair Craobh Dearg and known locally as "The City". A cashel is a stone-walled circular enclosure, the dry-stone equivalent of the more familiar earthen ringfort, and they were typically used as defended farmsteads or settlement enclosures during the early medieval period. Whatever the mapping error in the name, the stone itself has its own quiet strangeness.

Scholars Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nuallaín, writing in 1982, described it as "supposed to be a memorial stone", a characteristically cautious phrasing that suggests local tradition rather than documented evidence. What is better documented is what the stone may once have been. A Schools Manuscript for County Kerry, compiled in the 1940s as part of a nationwide folklore collection project, recorded the stone as slightly larger than its current measurements suggest, and noted that it had formerly stood higher. More intriguingly, the manuscript recorded traces of ogham writing on it. Ogham is an early medieval Irish script, typically carved as a series of notches and strokes along the edge or face of a stone, most often used to mark personal names in commemorative or funerary contexts. If the stone did carry an inscription, it has since been lost, worn away, or buried as the stone settled or sank over the centuries.