It is sub-rectangular in shape, meaning roughly four-sided but with the irregular, unworked edges that distinguish these prehistoric markers from later cut masonry, and it rises to just over one and a half metres. Modest by the standards of some Irish standing stones, it is nonetheless deliberate: aligned along a northeast-southwest axis, a orientation that recurs at standing stones across Ireland and may reflect astronomical or seasonal significance, though no single explanation has ever satisfied everyone.

Standing stones of this kind are among the most quietly enigmatic features of the Irish landscape. They were erected, in most cases, somewhere between the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age, a span running very roughly from 4000 to 1500 BC, though pinning down individual examples is difficult without excavation. Their purposes are debated: territorial markers, ritual foci, points on ancient routeways, memorials. The Ratharoon stone, recorded as part of the archaeological inventory of West Cork, sits in that long interpretive silence shared by hundreds of similar stones scattered across Munster and beyond. Its dimensions, 1.66 metres long and 0.58 metres wide at the base, suggest a stone selected and set with care rather than simply propped upright as a field boundary.