Sometime around 1973, this substantial prehistoric monolith, which had risen nearly ten feet from a south-facing pasture slope, was taken down and laid against a field fence to the west, where it remains. At 3.7 metres long, it is not easily missed, but the context that once gave it meaning, its upright position in the landscape, is gone.

What makes the stone more intriguing still is a detail noticed by two separate researchers decades apart. Writing in 1916, a scholar named Condon recorded what he described as imitation ogham markings on the stone's surface. Ogham is an early medieval script, most commonly found on standing stones in Ireland and Wales, in which letters are represented by groups of notches or strokes cut along a central line, usually the edge of the stone. The qualification here matters: the markings at Gormlee were not read as genuine ogham, carrying a legible inscription, but as something that resembles it without being it, whether a later carving by someone familiar with the script's appearance, a misreading of natural weathering, or something else entirely. The classicist R. A. S. Macalister, who catalogued ogham stones across Ireland and Britain in his landmark 1945 corpus, noted the same feature and listed the stone as entry number 52 in that work, placing it within the scholarly record while stopping short of treating the marks as authentic script. Condon's original description gives a sense of the stone's original form: nearly ten feet tall, tapering from 38 inches wide at the base to 30 inches near the top, and 16 inches thick, a proportioned and clearly deliberate prehistoric erection whose purpose, like most standing stones, remains a matter of informed guesswork.