It is not where it started out. By the time of the 1922 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the stone was recorded on the east side of the road; it has since been moved roughly sixty-five metres to the northwest and now sits on the opposite side. A small displacement in the grand scheme, but enough to make the object subtly anomalous, a waymarker that no longer marks quite the same way it once did.

The stone itself is a dressed, flat-topped limestone pillar of trapezoidal profile, just under a metre tall, with a narrow chamfer running down the front angles. On its top face, someone from the Ordnance Survey cut a bird's foot benchmark, the deeply incised symbol used by surveyors to record a fixed point of known elevation. The front face carries the inscription "16 from Galway", almost certainly placed there in the eighteenth century, when this route formed part of what researchers have identified as the Old Galway Road running from Gort northward into the city. It is one of nine such milestones surviving along that corridor, each a fragment of the same pre-modern road infrastructure. The stone has not had an entirely peaceful existence. At some point, a bonfire was set against its rear face, and the damage is still clearly visible; heavy spalling, where the surface has flaked and fractured from the heat, contrasts with only minor wear elsewhere on the stone. Traces of white paint, applied in more recent years to pick out the inscription, also remain on the front face.