It stands 1.75 metres high, roughly rectangular when viewed head-on, and its base measures just under a metre wide by about 42 centimetres deep. Its long axis runs west-northwest to east-southeast, an orientation that, like many Irish standing stones, may or may not be coincidental in relation to solar or lunar events. Nobody alive can say for certain why it was placed here, or by whom.

Standing stones of this kind are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland, yet they remain among the least understood. Most are thought to date from the Bronze Age, roughly 2000 to 500 BC, and they appear across the landscape as solitary markers, sometimes associated with burial sites or field boundaries, sometimes apparently isolated with no obvious relationship to anything nearby. This example at Gortreagh sits less than 150 metres from the channel that separates the Iveragh Peninsula from Valentia Island, a stretch of water that has carried boat traffic for centuries. Whether the stone predates that history of movement and exchange along the channel, or was in some way connected to it, is not recorded. It was catalogued as part of a comprehensive archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, which remains a key reference for the prehistoric and early historic monuments of South Kerry.

The stone sits in an area where the landscape is relatively low-lying and open, with the channel visible nearby. Its position so close to the water's edge gives it a slightly liminal quality, the sense of something placed deliberately at a boundary, though that reading may say more about the observer than the monument itself.