Sometime between its careful recording in 1939 and a later survey nearly five decades on, the stone had been shifted from its original position and left lying against a field bank a short distance to the east. It is the kind of quiet dislocation that happens to ancient things when agricultural life pushes up against them, and it means that what was once an upright marker in the landscape is now, effectively, a recumbent one.

When it was recorded in 1939, the stone was oriented roughly northeast to southwest and measured just under a metre in height. By the time it was examined again in 1987, it had grown in a sense, or at least its full dimensions became apparent once it was no longer buried in the earth: 1.7 metres long, 0.8 metres wide, and 0.4 metres thick. The material is possibly limestone, though this has not been confirmed. Standing stones, which are single upright prehistoric stones set into the ground, are common across Ireland but rarely come with explanatory labels; their original purposes remain a matter of debate, ranging from territorial markers to ceremonial or astronomical functions. What makes the Deerpark stone particularly interesting is its context. An ecclesiastical site sits roughly 120 metres to the north-northeast, which raises the possibility that the stone and the later religious site shared something about this particular patch of ground, a pattern seen at other Irish locations where early Christian communities established themselves near pre-existing prehistoric monuments. The stone also appears on the 1940 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, suggesting it was still a recognisable feature of the local landscape within living memory, set towards the bottom of a west-facing slope with a north-south stream running some 350 metres further west.