Before the trees came, the stone would have looked out eastward over the Ox Mountains and southward toward Nephin and the Nephin Beg range, occupying a position just below the head of a valley that also contained at least two court tombs and a stone row within 800 metres. A court tomb is a Neolithic megalithic monument, typically a roofed burial gallery set within a cairn and preceded by an open forecourt, and the clustering of such monuments around a single standing stone suggests this stretch of Mayo upland was once a considered, purposeful landscape rather than an accidental scatter of prehistoric remains.

The stone was first recorded by archaeologists de Valéra and Ó Nualláin in 1964, who noted it from the nearby court tomb to the east, describing how the ground rose to a conspicuous upright block that overlooked the site. After afforestation of the area, its exact location became uncertain and it dropped from the record. It was rediscovered in 2012 by Alan O'Raw. The stone itself is a block of banded granite, asymmetrical and tapering to a triangular peak with the apex oriented to the south. Its long axis runs roughly north-northeast to south-southwest. Particularly distinctive is a narrow seam of quartzite that creates a raised white scar running across the top of the stone and down part of its north-west and north-east faces, a natural feature that would have been visually striking even before anyone shaped or raised the block. A small red sandstone block sits about 35 centimetres to the south-east, though whether it bears any prehistoric relationship to the standing stone or simply happened to end up nearby is unclear. A quarried-out section of slope immediately to the south-east and a spread of loose stones roughly six metres to the north-east add further texture to the immediate setting, their origins and significance still obscured by accumulated forest debris.