Local tradition, preserved in the Schools Manuscripts collected in the mid-twentieth century, holds that a great warrior lies buried beneath it. The landowner, by contrast, maintains that someone in living or recent memory simply planted it there as a scratching post for cattle, which would make it not ancient at all, but a piece of agricultural improvisation that has since wandered into the folklore of the landscape.

The stone itself sits in a roughly circular hollow about four metres across, worn down some twenty-six centimetres by generations of cattle doing precisely what a scratching post invites. It is aligned north to south, rectangular in plan with a rounded head and straight sides, giving it the profile of a grave marker, which may help explain why the warrior story attached itself so readily. The sandstone has quartz running through it, the west face is split and uneven, and the east face carries natural scoring across a fairly flat surface. A crack runs down from the top, splitting the stone along its length. Notably, there are no packing-stones at the base, the kind of deliberate arrangement typically found around prehistoric standing stones to hold them upright, a detail that quietly supports the more prosaic explanation. It does not appear on Ordnance Survey maps from 1840 or 1904, which adds another small piece of circumstantial evidence against great antiquity, though absence from a map is not quite the same as proof of nothing.