What makes this particular stone unusual is that the prehistoric carving covering its upper surface was described by the scholar who first studied it, Elizabeth Shee, as quite untypical of Irish rock art. That is a quiet but pointed observation. Rock art of this kind, produced by pecking shallow marks into exposed stone, is most commonly associated with the Bronze Age and tends to follow broadly recognisable conventions across Atlantic Europe. Whatever the Clearagh stone is doing, it seems to be doing it differently.

The decoration was hidden in plain sight for decades, buried beneath a field fence, and only came to light around 1953 when the landowner removed the boundary. The boulder, a slightly rough and unfractured sandstone, measures roughly 3.20 metres north to south and 2.20 metres east to west, and sits at around 226 metres above sea level on a small plateau of a north-north-west-facing slope, with The Paps Mountains visible to the north-west and the valleys of the Lee and Bride rivers opening out to the north and north-east. The decorated surface is split into two distinct levels, north and south, as though the stone itself imposed its own internal organisation on whoever made the marks. The northern half carries a picked linear motif and around twelve cup-and-ring motifs, seven of them incomplete, and is framed by a broad well-picked line running parallel to the change in level. Cup-and-ring motifs are exactly what the name suggests, a small circular hollow, or cup, surrounded by one or more carved concentric rings. On the southern half, itself divided by a natural crack, there are eight further cup-and-ring motifs, again mostly incomplete. Shee noted that there were few clearly distinguishable motifs, that the patterns merge into and connect with one another, and that the carving throughout is shallow and, in her word, difficult to describe. At the time of a more recent visit, a dried layer of slurry was obscuring some of the decoration entirely, which adds its own small layer of irony to a stone that spent so long covered up.