Yet there it stands in a marshy stretch of ground roughly 120 metres north of the river Currane, near Waterville in County Kerry, a rectangular block of stone rising 1.75 metres out of the wet ground, quietly outlasting the cartographers who never recorded it.

Standing stones are among the most enigmatic monuments in the Irish landscape. Erected most commonly during the Bronze Age, though sometimes earlier or later, they served purposes that remain genuinely uncertain, ranging from territorial markers and burial indicators to sites of ritual or astronomical alignment. This particular example is narrow and blade-like in section, measuring just 0.4 metres by 0.13 metres at its base along an east-west axis, giving it a slender, almost purposeful profile. Around the base, traces of packing stones are still visible, the small wedged rocks used to stabilise the upright when it was first set into the ground, a detail that brings the original act of erection into surprisingly close focus. The stone was recorded in the archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by Aidan O'Sullivan and Jerry Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, though its absence from OS mapping suggests it had slipped through earlier documentary nets entirely.

The marshy ground around the stone means the approach is likely to be soft underfoot, particularly after rain, which on the Iveragh Peninsula is a reasonable expectation at almost any time of year. The river Currane, which flows nearby, drains Lough Currane to the west, and the low-lying character of this whole area gives the landscape a quiet, waterlogged quality that makes a lone standing stone feel especially out of place and, at the same time, entirely at home.