It is not especially tall, at 1.9 metres in height, nor dramatically shaped, being roughly rectangular in plan and measuring approximately 0.9 metres by 0.5 metres at its base. What it does have is a quiet, off-kilter presence: it leans slightly to the north-west, its long axis oriented along a north-east to south-west line, a detail that may or may not be intentional but is characteristic of the quiet geometries that recur across Irish prehistoric monuments.

Standing stones of this kind are among the most common and least understood prehistoric monuments in Ireland. They appear throughout the landscape in their thousands, raised during the Bronze Age in most cases, though the precise purpose of any individual stone is rarely recoverable. Some marked boundaries, some may have been associated with burial, some appear to have astronomical alignments, and some perhaps served as waymarkers across open ground. The orientation of the Cloghboola Beg stone along a north-east to south-west axis places it within a pattern seen at many such monuments, though whether that reflects deliberate celestial alignment or something more pragmatic is impossible to say without further investigation. The townland name itself, Cloghboola, derives from the Irish and contains the element "cloch", meaning stone, suggesting the local landscape has long been defined, at least in name, by its lithic presence.