The stone at Balloughton has a rectangular cross-section and runs roughly north-northeast to south-southwest, and its granite surface is threaded with veins of quartz, a feature common enough in Irish prehistoric standing stones that some scholars have argued quartz was deliberately sought out for its visual or symbolic qualities.

The more intriguing part of this stone's story lies in the scholarship surrounding it. In the 1880s, G. H. Kinahan recorded what he believed to be cupmarks on the surface, small circular depressions that, when genuinely present, are among the oldest forms of decorative or ritual carving found on prehistoric monuments in Ireland and Britain. Decades later, R. A. S. Macalister, writing in 1949 in his comprehensive catalogue of ogham inscriptions, included this stone among those bearing the early medieval script, ogham being a system of strokes and notches carved along a stone's edge to represent letters of the Irish alphabet. Both identifications were taken seriously enough to be published and cited. Neither, on closer examination, can be confirmed. The cupmarks and the ogham inscription have since been rejected, leaving the stone as something slightly more austere: a substantial prehistoric upright with no decipherable markings, recorded cartographically only from the 1925 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, and standing on ground flat enough that it would have been visible across a considerable distance from the moment it was first raised.