Rather than a ceremonial or boundary marker in the conventional sense, it may have functioned as little more than a very permanent whetstone, worked by whoever passed by and needed an edge.

The stone is rectangular in plan and modest in scale, standing just over a metre high and measuring roughly 57 centimetres by 26 centimetres in cross-section. It sits to the east of a ringfort, one of those circular earthwork enclosures that dot the Irish countryside and typically date to the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1100 AD. The proximity is unlikely to be coincidental, though whether the stone predates the ringfort or was simply convenient to it is not recorded. Notably, it does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of either 1842 or 1904, which means it was either overlooked by surveyors or had not yet been identified as archaeologically significant. Its first recorded mention in the literature appears to come from Condon in 1916, who noted the sharpening grooves and flagged the stone's probable function.