Locally it has always been called Farbrega, from the Irish fear bréagach, meaning "false man", a name that captures something both practical and a little unsettling about the stone's presence on the landscape.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp recorded it in 1898, describing it as a "fantastic rock, somewhat resembling a human figure", and the local name he noted suggests the resemblance had already been remarked upon for generations. The slab is limestone, 0.8 metres wide and 0.6 metres thick, oriented roughly north to south, and its base may rest in a gryke, one of the natural fissures that open along joint lines in the Burren's karst pavement. Whether it was deliberately erected as a standing stone or is a natural formation shaped by glacial and chemical weathering is not entirely settled, though its upright position and the possibility of deliberate placement in a gryke leave the question genuinely open. It has since been incorporated into a drystone field wall running northwest to southeast, the kind of quiet absorption of older features into later agricultural boundaries that happens throughout the Irish countryside. A cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort, lies roughly 41 metres to the south-southeast, suggesting the area was organised and inhabited at some point in the early medieval period at least.

The stone sits on a shelf of ground with the land dropping steeply about 38 metres to the northwest, which means it commands a broad view across the two valleys even as it remains half-hidden by undergrowth. Visitors should expect rough going through dense vegetation to reach it, and the integration into the field wall means it can be easy to mistake for ordinary stonework on first glance.