Roughly a metre tall, it has been worn smooth along its sides by generations of cattle and sheep using it as a scratching post, and the animals have ground a shallow hollow into the earth around its base. It is the kind of stone that, in another field, might attract quiet reverence. Here, the honest assessment is that it may simply be a farmer's practical solution to an itchy herd.

What complicates the picture is the company the stone keeps. About 130 metres to the north lies Nugent's Castle, a fortified structure associated with the Nugent family who held lands in this part of Westmeath. Some 195 metres to the south-east, a second stone has been identified, though its status is equally uncertain. Standing stones, when genuine prehistoric monuments, were typically erected during the Bronze Age or earlier as markers, boundary indicators, or sites of ritual significance, and they often appear in loose groupings across a landscape. The possibility that this stone belongs to such a pattern is not entirely dismissed. What does count against it is the cartographic record: neither the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837 nor the revised twenty-five-inch edition of 1913 shows any antiquity at this location. If the stone had been regarded as ancient by the nineteenth or early twentieth century, it would almost certainly have been noted by surveyors who were generally attentive to such features.