It stands just 1.75 metres tall and barely 10 centimetres thick, a narrow, flat-topped pillar aligned roughly north to south, planted at the eastern end of a low, grass-covered stony rise that itself only clears the surrounding ground by about half a metre. Nothing about its immediate setting announces significance. And yet the position was clearly chosen with some care: Nephin Mountain sits prominent on the horizon to the south-southwest, Knocknarea in Sligo is visible to the east-northeast, and the mountains of Donegal define the skyline to the north-east. Whatever purpose the stone once served, its placement commands an extraordinary sweep of the western landscape.

Standing stones of this kind are scattered across Ireland, prehistoric in origin and resistant to precise dating, typically thought to belong to the Bronze Age, though some may be earlier or later. Their functions remain debated; some appear to mark boundaries or routeways, others may have had ritual or commemorative roles. This particular stone above Lackan Bay was already old enough to be unremarkable by the nineteenth century: it appears on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from 1838, simply labelled as "Standing Stone", and again on the equivalent 1922 edition, suggesting it had been a recognised feature of the landscape for generations before anyone thought to formally record it. The low, elongated stony rise on which it stands, roughly 3.4 metres east to west and just half a metre high, may be the remnant of a cairn or earlier structure, though the notes do not elaborate on this.