It is ten centimetres wide and two centimetres deep, consistent enough to suggest repeated, deliberate contact over a long period, yet there are no pock marks of the kind left by tool work. Whatever made it, hands or rope or the slow friction of some ritual purpose long forgotten, the groove is there, and the stone says nothing more about it.

The gallaun, to use the Irish term for a single standing stone, rises 2.10 metres from a low mound on the western edge of a grazing field in Lissooleen, Co. Kerry, where the River Lee bounds the land to the west and south. It is aligned roughly north-north-west to south-south-east, broadening slightly from its rectangular base before tapering upward to a point. On its north face sit two natural solution hollows, shallow depressions formed by the chemical weathering of the stone rather than by human hands. The stone stands immediately to the north-west of a bi-vallate ringfort, meaning a circular enclosure defended by two concentric earthen banks and ditches, a form common in early medieval Ireland. A survey conducted by the Irish Tourism Association in 1944 and 1945 recorded the fort as having a north-facing entrance, and noted that directly outside that entrance stood a tall slender gallaun, eight feet high, with a ring worn into it two feet above the ground. The proximity is almost certainly not coincidental. Standing stones are frequently found in association with ringforts and earlier prehistoric enclosures across Kerry, and the surrounding landscape, with its limestone outcrops and river boundaries, places this particular stone within a wider pattern of prehistoric and early medieval settlement in the Lee Valley studied by Michael Connolly in his 2008 doctoral research at University College Cork.