The structure is a leacht cuimhne, a wayside memorial monument of a kind once relatively common in the west of Ireland, typically built at the roadside to mark a place of significance in someone's death or funeral journey. This one is modest in scale, roughly 1.2 metres square and 1.75 metres tall, and was originally topped with a cross that has since been displaced. Two plaques set into its north face carry the name Anne Dirrane and the date 1846, placing her death squarely in the opening years of the Great Famine, a detail that lends even a plain stone structure a particular weight.

The year 1846 was the second year of the potato blight and the first of catastrophic, widespread starvation across Ireland. On the Aran Islands, as elsewhere along the western seaboard, the population depended heavily on the potato, and the mid-1840s brought devastating loss. Whether Anne Dirrane was a direct victim of the Famine or simply died in that grim period is not recorded here, but the coincidence of date is not easy to set aside. The monument was noted by Tim Robinson, whose meticulous mapping of the Aran Islands in 1980 documented many such features that might otherwise have gone unrecorded. Directly across the road from the leacht, on the north side, lies a group of wayside cairns, small accumulations of stone left by passers-by, a practice with deep roots in Irish and broader Celtic tradition, suggesting this stretch of road carried some significance in the local landscape of memory and ritual.

The leacht today is described as dilapidated, its crowning cross gone from its original position, its stonework worn. It sits next to the present school, which means it occupies a place in daily life rather than standing apart in a field or graveyard. Anyone passing through Kilmurvey on the main road would go right by it.