It stands 1.44 metres tall and is noticeably narrow, measuring just under a metre across at its base and less than twenty centimetres in depth. A gallaun, as these solitary standing stones are known in Irish, is the simplest possible monument: one stone, upright, placed by human hands and left to whatever centuries followed. No inscription, no enclosure, no obvious partner stone. The orientation here runs roughly east-northeast to west-southwest, a alignment that may or may not have been deliberate, though it would hardly be surprising if it was.

Galláin are found across Ireland, and their age is notoriously difficult to pin down without excavation. Most are thought to date from the Bronze Age, somewhere in the broad span between 2500 and 500 BC, though some may be later. They have been interpreted variously as boundary markers, commemorative monuments, and indicators of routeways or sacred sites. The Iveragh Peninsula, the great southwestern finger of Kerry that contains the Ring of Kerry, is particularly dense with prehistoric remains of this kind, and this example at Málainn sits within that wider landscape of ancient activity on the slopes above the Atlantic coastline. Its recorded dimensions and orientation come from a 1996 archaeological survey of South Kerry compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, which catalogued monuments across the peninsula in systematic detail.