Ireland has hundreds of standing stones, and most are shorter. What gives this one a quiet particularity is its shape and the evidence of how it was set: trapezoidal in plan, meaning it tapers from a broader base toward a narrower top, and held in place by packing-stones that are still visible at ground level. Those packing-stones are a detail easy to overlook, but they speak directly to the act of erection, the practical problem of keeping a slab of this size upright in sloping ground, solved by whoever raised it by wedging smaller stones around the base before the earth was filled back in.

The stone's name, Cloch Eidhneach, is in Irish, and translates roughly as the ivy-covered stone, or stone of ivy, suggesting it has been a recognised feature in the landscape long enough to acquire a descriptive name in the local tradition. Its long axis runs east to west, an orientation shared by many prehistoric standing stones across Ireland and often discussed in the context of solar alignments, though whether that was deliberate here is unknown. The stone leans slightly to the south, which after what may be several thousand years of standing in sloping ground is perhaps less surprising than the fact that it remains upright at all. Its dimensions, roughly a metre wide and just over thirty centimetres thick at its broadest, make it a substantial but not monumental slab, more in the middle range of Cork's prehistoric standing stones than at the extreme end.