This roughly rectangular slab, measuring 1.53 metres tall and just 0.55 metres wide, sat unnoticed in a level patch of boggy ground in Maularaha townland, County Cork, until archaeological monitoring ahead of a proposed forestry scheme brought it to attention in November of that year. It stands between two areas of rock outcrop, about eight metres north of a stream, on an east-west alignment that may or may not be intentional but is the kind of detail prehistorians tend to note carefully.

Standing stones are among the most enigmatic of Ireland's prehistoric monuments. Erected most commonly during the Bronze Age, their precise purposes remain debated; some appear to mark boundaries or routeways, others may have had ritual or astronomical significance, and many seem to stand in deliberate relationship with the wider landscape around them. This one is heavily weathered, its surface rough-textured in the way of stone that has been exposed to bog conditions for a very long time. What gives it a particular quiet interest is its sightline. Looking to the west-southwest from the stone, roughly 460 metres away, lies a ringfort, the kind of circular enclosure, usually defined by an earthen bank and ditch, that was a common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland. Whether the standing stone predates that ringfort by a millennium or more, or whether the two features were ever understood by past inhabitants as part of the same meaningful landscape, is not something the ground can yet answer.