Yet standing stones like this one are among the most persistent and least explained features of the Irish landscape. Erected during prehistory, most likely in the Bronze Age, they survive because stone outlasts almost everything else, and because generations of farmers, though they ploughed around them and occasionally incorporated them into field boundaries, generally left them alone.

This particular stone has a subrectangular form, meaning its cross-section is roughly rectangular rather than rounded or irregular, and it stands 2.8 metres tall with a face measuring approximately 2.11 metres by 0.91 metres. Its long axis is aligned northeast to southwest, a orientation shared by a number of Irish standing stones and one that has prompted speculation about astronomical or ceremonial significance, though no consensus exists. What is clear is that whoever set it here chose the spot deliberately. The field commands open views in every direction, which may have mattered for reasons now entirely lost to us, whether those reasons were practical, territorial, or ritual.