This one does not. Sitting low in the bog on the western side of the Blackwater river valley in County Kerry, the Dromlusk stone barely clears a metre in height, and its boulder-like form means it can read, at first glance, as simply another lump of the landscape. But its geometry gives it away: roughly rectangular at the base, measuring 1.75 metres by 0.7 metres east to west, with one edge tapering gradually inward and the other rising in a near-vertical line to a relatively flat top. It is a deliberate shape, placed with deliberate intent on a north-south ridge in a stretch of open bog.

Who placed it there, and when, is not recorded, but the company it keeps offers a clue. Roughly a hundred metres to the south lies a ringbarrow, a low circular earthwork of the type typically used for burial during the Bronze Age, consisting of a central mound enclosed within a bank and outer ditch. The pairing of standing stones with funerary monuments of this kind is not unusual across Ireland; stones were frequently positioned in relation to burial sites, perhaps as markers, perhaps as something harder to categorise. The Iveragh Peninsula, on which Dromlusk sits, is dense with this kind of prehistoric layering, its bogland preserving features that elsewhere have long since been ploughed away or built over. The valley of the Blackwater, running through that landscape, would have been a corridor of movement and settlement for communities whose relationship with this terrain stretched across millennia.