The stone is a gallaun, the Irish term for a standing stone, and this one has a particular quality of displacement about it: the whinstone from which it is cut does not occur locally at all, but is found in quantity at the cliffs near Kerry Head, some nine miles to the north-west. Someone, at some point in prehistory, moved this block a considerable distance to plant it at the highest point of the ridge.

Writing in 1892, a local historian named Lynch recorded what was then known of the site and its surroundings. A farmer, Mr B. M'Elligott, had been widening a nearby road when he uncovered, just below the surface, a stone-lined grave, its roof made of thin limestone flags, lying within roughly eighty yards of the gallaun itself. Lynch observed that the standing stone sat within a shallow circular trench and embankment roughly 36 metres in diameter, the kind of earthwork now recognised as a possible ring-barrow, a low burial monument defined by a ditch and outer bank. He also noted that about 65 metres to the west, on the same ridge, lay the remains of a substantial stone enclosure called Cahirfert. The townland name, Ardconnel, meaning the height of Conal, led Lynch to propose that this place was the Ardconail mentioned in the medieval Book of Rights as one of the royal seats of the Kings of Cashel. He suggested, with careful tentativeness, that the gallaun might be the memorial stone of a chief named Conal, though he acknowledged that neither history nor legend preserves anything further about the man. The stone itself, measured at 2.4 metres above ground, 0.9 metres broad, and 0.4 metres thick, appears on Ordnance Survey maps of both 1842 and 1897. At some point in the 1940s it was moved from its original position on top of a mound to a field bank roughly twenty metres to the north, which means the stone a visitor sees today is not quite where it stood when Lynch was writing, let alone when it was first erected.