The main stone stands 2.65 metres tall, subrectangular in plan and leaning slightly to the north, its long axis running roughly northeast to southwest, with packing stones still visible at its base. A second stone, just over two metres in length, lies on the ground 1.4 metres to the north, presumably fallen at some point in the distant past.

The local antiquarian James Grove White, writing in the early twentieth century, recorded both the giant tradition and a stranger discovery that had passed into local memory. Around 1850, according to accounts he collected, a skull was found under a rock in a nearby glen, close to what people called the gallaun, an older Irish term for a single standing stone. The skull was described as larger than a weight pot, thick and heavy, and possessed of only a single eye socket set in the centre of the forehead. A sword was said to have been found alongside it. Whether the skull belonged to an animal misidentified in the retelling, or whether the account had accrued detail with each generation, Grove White did not say. What the story does is attach the stone to a coherent local mythology: a one-eyed giant, physically enormous, who left the mark of his labour on the rock itself and whose remains lay nearby in a glen. Standing stones of this type are prehistoric monuments whose original purpose remains uncertain, but they accumulated meaning over millennia, and the traditions gathered around this one in North Cork are as layered as any in the county.