It stands only a metre high, rectangular in plan, with its long axis oriented roughly north-northwest to south-southeast, and it tilts noticeably toward the south-southeast. Whether it is a standing stone, erected deliberately as a marker or monument, or simply a fragment of something more mundane, is genuinely unclear.

The uncertainty is not false modesty. About 120 metres to the east lie the remains of pre-bog walls, structures that predate the formation of the surrounding bogland and were subsequently robbed of much of their stone. The slab could be a survivor of those same walls, left standing by chance or by the particular way the ground was cleared. Schist is a coarse, layered metamorphic rock common to parts of Connacht, and a slab of it in a field might mean almost anything. Cutaway bog, land from which the peat has been industrially stripped, often reveals buried or half-buried features that were invisible for centuries beneath the accumulation of organic material, which makes identification harder rather than easier. The landscape around Ballynew has clearly been worked and altered across many periods, and this small upright stone sits somewhere in the middle of that long, imperfectly legible story.