It is a striking presence in an otherwise open landscape, positioned precisely at the junction of two old field banks, and overlooked to the south by a low ridge that gradually merges with sand dunes to the north-east. The stone itself is straight-sided and pillar-like, tapering towards a roughly triangular peak, measuring 0.46 metres across its north-east to south-west face and 0.32 metres on the other. That such a carefully shaped and deliberately placed monument survives here, in coastal pasture rather than on dramatic high ground, gives it a quietly anomalous quality.

Two quite different traditions have attached themselves to the stone, and both were recorded as living oral memory when the Ordnance Survey Letters were compiled in 1838. One account held that St. Patrick himself erected it, folding the site into the broader web of Patrician legend that stretches across the west of Ireland. The other tradition offered a more martial explanation: that the stone was raised to commemorate a victory of the Irish over Danes, who were routed from this location and driven to the sea. This second account, cited by O'Flanagan in 1927, places the monument within a widespread class of local memory in which standing stones, those large upright megaliths whose true prehistoric origins were long forgotten, were reinterpreted as markers of Viking-age conflict. Whether the stone predates both traditions by several millennia is not recorded, but the pairing of a Patrician legend with a battle-commemoration story is itself telling, two very different frameworks reaching for the same ancient object.