It measures roughly one and a half metres in length and about seventy centimetres in width, dimensions that suggest it would have made a reasonably modest but solid upright when it was still vertical. At some point between the early twentieth century and the present, it toppled, and there it has remained, in open pasture, largely unremarked.

What makes its fallen state particularly telling is that we know almost exactly when it was still standing. In 1907, a local historian and antiquary named Grove White photographed it upright, the image appearing in his multi-volume survey of Cork antiquities published between 1905 and 1925. That photograph fixes a moment in the stone's long history when it could still be seen as its builders intended, a single piece of worked or selected stone set into the earth of a hillside. Standing stones of this kind are scattered across Ireland, and their original purposes remain largely a matter of scholarly debate; some appear to mark boundaries or routeways, others may be connected with burial or ritual, and many simply resist easy interpretation. This particular example has since lost the one quality that defined it.