Standing just under a metre tall on a south-facing slope in Barnacurra, the stone is triangular both in its flat plan and in its overall shape, with its long axis oriented roughly north-northwest to south-southeast. What makes it quietly arresting are the marks on its surface: three small indentations along the southern corner of its east face, and a rough X-shaped cross carved onto its north-northwest face.

The stone never appeared on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1842 or 1904, which means it escaped the attention of nineteenth-century surveyors who recorded a great many prehistoric monuments across the Irish countryside. Whether it was obscured by vegetation, simply overlooked, or not yet recognised as significant at those times is unknown. Standing stones as a class are among the most enigmatic of Irish prehistoric monuments; they were erected across a broad span of prehistory, and their original purposes, whether as boundary markers, ritual focal points, or astronomical indicators, remain genuinely uncertain in most cases. The incised marks on this particular stone add another layer of ambiguity. The three indentations are small but consistent in form, each a few centimetres long and roughly two centimetres wide. The X-shaped cross is rough rather than refined, which makes it difficult to assign a confident date or meaning, though simple cross forms were used in Ireland across a wide period, from early medieval Christianity onward.