Set into a west-facing pasture slope in Lisballyhay, the standing stone is threaded through with quartz, particularly concentrated towards its southern end, giving it a quality that would have caught the light in ways the surrounding landscape does not. This is unlikely to be accidental. Across prehistoric Ireland and Britain, quartz was deliberately incorporated into ceremonial and funerary monuments, apparently valued for its luminous, almost otherworldly appearance. Whether the people who raised this stone selected it for that quality, or shaped it to emphasise it, is a question the stone itself does not answer.

The stone stands one metre above ground, measuring roughly 1.5 metres in total length and 0.45 metres across. It is subrectangular in plan, slightly wedge-shaped in cross-section, and tapers to a blunt point at its southern end. Its orientation runs north to south, a alignment that appears in numerous Irish standing stones, though the reasons behind such orientations remain debated. Standing stones, which are among the most widespread prehistoric monument types in Ireland, were erected across a long span of prehistory, most commonly during the Bronze Age, and their functions are thought to have varied widely, from territorial markers to sites of ritual significance. This particular example sits unobtrusively in farmland, doing what so many of its kind do across Munster: quietly persisting.