It is a remarkably slender thing for its height, just 1.4 metres wide and only a quarter of a metre thick, giving it the quality of a blade or a marker rather than a monument built for bulk. Standing stones of this kind are a recurring feature of the Irish landscape, raised during the prehistoric period, most likely in the Bronze Age, though their precise purposes remain genuinely uncertain. They may have served as boundary markers, as focal points for ritual activity, or as astronomical alignments keyed to the movements of the sun or moon.

The alignment here is worth pausing over. A northeast to southwest orientation is not uncommon among Irish standing stones, and some researchers have associated it with solar or lunar events at particular times of year, though no specific astronomical interpretation has been attached to this stone in the published record. What is noted is the view: the pasture in which it stands looks out over the sea to the south, which may or may not have been a factor in the original choice of location. The stone was recorded by O'Brien in 1970 and subsequently included in the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, the systematic survey of the county's prehistoric and early historic monuments compiled in the early 1990s.