The Ordnance Survey teams who walked and recorded the landscape in 1842 did not mark it, and neither did those who returned in 1904. It stands about one and a half metres tall in open pasture on a south-southwest-facing slope, subrectangular in plan, oriented with its long axis running roughly north to south. Whether the surveyors overlooked it, or whether local conditions obscured it at the time, is not recorded. The stone is simply there, unacknowledged in the cartographic record for over a century.

Standing stones are among the most enigmatic survivals of prehistoric Ireland. They were erected across a long span of time, most commonly during the Bronze Age, and their purposes remain genuinely uncertain; proposed explanations range from territorial markers to ritual focal points to elements of now-vanished landscape arrangements. The Knocknalyre stone, measuring roughly 73 centimetres by 50 centimetres at its base, is modest by comparison with some of the great monoliths found elsewhere in Munster, but its proportions and placement on a sloping hillside fit a pattern seen across the Cork landscape. Its absence from both nineteenth-century surveys suggests it may have been buried, fallen, or simply inconspicuous at those moments in time, and was recognised as a standing stone only later.