It lies fallen now, measuring just under a metre and a half in length, with a cross-section of roughly a metre by forty-five centimetres, so it was never a towering monument. What it was intended to mark, commemorate, or signal remains unknown, as is so often the case with these solitary prehistoric stones.

The stone's absence from the six-inch Ordnance Survey maps of both 1842 and 1904 raises a quiet puzzle. Either it had already fallen by the time the surveyors passed through and was simply overlooked as a large loose boulder, or it lay in a part of the landscape that escaped close attention. Standing stones, which are exactly what the name suggests, single upright stones set deliberately into the ground, are among the most common and most enigmatic prehistoric monuments in Ireland. They date across a broad range of periods and purposes, and without excavation it is rarely possible to say more. This one sits at the base of a slope beside a small watercourse, the kind of marginal, transitional place that recurs again and again in the siting of such monuments across Cork and beyond.