It rises close to the inner face of an earthen bank, oriented along a NNE-SSW axis, its base measuring 1.2 metres by 0.4 metres, and it leans, just perceptibly, to the west. Roughly rectangular in elevation, it has the upright, deliberate presence that characterises the class of monument known in Irish as a gallaun, a single unworked or minimally shaped stone raised in prehistory for purposes that remain genuinely uncertain.

What adds a particular layer of interest here is a local tradition, preserved in the Irish Folklore Commission's Schools' Collection, that the stone carries an ogham inscription. Ogham is an early medieval script, typically carved as a series of notches and lines along the edge or face of a stone, and its presence on a standing stone would place the monument within a wider tradition of commemorative or territorial marking found across Munster. The difficulty is that no such inscription is actually visible on the Dromtine stone. Whether it has weathered away, was never there to begin with, or lies on a face not easily examined is unclear. The gap between what local memory holds and what the stone now shows is, in its own way, as interesting as any inscription would have been.