These upright slabs of local rock, planted into the earth by human hands somewhere between the Neolithic period and the early medieval era, tend to resist tidy categorisation. Some marked burial sites, some appear to have served as territorial indicators or waypoints, and others may have carried ritual or astronomical significance. This particular example in Keel is one of many scattered across the Kerry landscape, a county unusually dense with prehistoric monuments.

Beyond its location in Keel, the documentary record for this stone is presently thin, which is itself a small reflection of how much prehistoric material in rural Ireland remains formally undescribed. The mechanics of fieldwork, cataloguing, and publication take time, and Kerry alone contains hundreds of recorded monuments at various stages of documentation. What the stone almost certainly shares with its counterparts elsewhere is a long and quiet continuity, having survived millennia of agricultural change, land clearance, and the general disruption of the landscape simply by being too large and too awkward to move.