It is not a decorated stone, not an ogham-inscribed pillar, not anything that announces its own importance. What makes it unusual is precisely its plainness, and the quiet insistence of the low rectangular cairn, roughly 3.5 metres long and half a metre high, that has been piled around its base as though the earth itself needed anchoring.

According to O'Flanagan, writing in 1917, the pillar is said to mark the resting place of a saint, though no name is attached to that tradition in surviving records. The stone stands around 150 metres to the west-southwest of Teampall na Ceathrair Álainn, a church whose name translates roughly as the Church of the Four Beautiful Saints, which suggests the area carried strong early Christian associations. A pillar stone of this kind, a tall undressed slab set upright in the ground, belongs to a long tradition in Ireland of marking significant places, whether graves, boundaries, or sites of veneration, with a single vertical form. That this one is accompanied by a cairn, a heap of stones gathered around its foot, gives it the character of a monument that different hands have added to over time, each addition a small act of remembrance for something no longer fully remembered.