Just over a metre tall at its highest point, the stone is aligned north to south, and its surface has been worn to a dull polish not by ancient ritual or the passage of pilgrims, but by cattle using it as a scratching post. There is something quietly levelling about that detail: a monument that has stood since prehistory, reduced in recent centuries to a convenient itch-reliever for livestock.

The stone's jagged, irregular top suggests it was broken at some point, and a separate piece of limestone lying on the surface of the cairn roughly 0.7 metres to the south may well be the missing section. If so, the original stone would have stood considerably taller than its current height of 1.08 metres. Packing stones remain visible at its base, the kind of deliberate wedging used by the people who first erected it to keep it upright and stable, a small practical detail that connects the monument to the hands that placed it. Standing stones of this kind are a familiar feature of the Irish prehistoric landscape, though their precise function remains debated; they are variously associated with burial monuments, territorial markers, and astronomical alignments. The north-south orientation of this particular example, positioned as it is at the edge of a cairn, a mound of stones typically covering a burial, suggests it may have served some commemorative or ceremonial purpose in relation to the funerary monument beside it.