When members of the Kerry Field Club visited in 1943, they noted a small hole, roughly an inch in diameter, at the base of the stone. Nobody knows its purpose, and it can no longer be found. The markings on the east and west faces, which may be ogham, the early medieval Irish script typically carved along the edge of a stone as a series of notches and lines, remain visible but unconfirmed. The stone itself has been displaced westwards from wherever it originally stood, repositioned against a nearby fieldbank at some point in the past.

The stone appears on Ordnance Survey maps from both 1841 to 1842 and 1898, each time labelled as "Gallaun", the Irish term for a standing stone. Rising to 2.25 metres in height and roughly half a metre wide and thick, it is a substantial monolith. Stones of this type were raised across Ireland during prehistory for purposes that varied by site; this one is thought to have marked a burial ground. Whether the possible ogham inscription relates to that funerary function, or dates from a different period of the stone's long use, is not established. What is clear is that by the time cartographers were recording the landscape in the nineteenth century, it was already old enough to warrant a name on the map.