The stone, tapering to a rounded point at its western end, is all that visibly remains of what was once a pair of standing gallauns, the Irish term for upright megalithic stones, that were still tall enough in the nineteenth century to be mapped and measured. By the time anyone thought to record them properly, they were already half destroyed, and by the end of that same century, they were gone almost entirely.

When the antiquarian John Windele visited in 1848, he found the two stones had been toppled some months earlier by treasure seekers who had undermined their bases. Even fallen, they told a considerable story. The uppermost stone carried an ogham inscription, ogham being an early medieval script in which letters are encoded as notches and strokes cut along the edge of a stone, and both stones had formerly stood within a circle of fifteen or sixteen stones with a diameter of roughly ten metres, though that ring was already barely perceptible by Windele's time. He and the scholar R. R. Brash, who visited in 1872, both read the ogham as ANM CRUNAN MAQ LUQISMA, a formulaic early Irish memorial phrase meaning roughly "the name of Crunan, son of Luqisma". By Brash's visit, half the mound had been cut away, several of the surrounding stones removed, and a large flake knocked off the inscribed angle of the ogham stone, damaging the text. Brash described the remaining arrangement as a "megalithic sepulchral arrangement", suggesting a burial context for the whole complex. R. A. S. Macalister later recorded that road-makers demolished what remained in the late 1880s, and he worked from an earlier illustration by Hitchcock, which gave a slightly different reading of the inscription's final word as LUQIN rather than LUQISMA. What survives today, then, is a mound, one recumbent slab, and a paper trail of successive losses.