A thin granite standing stone in County Kildare has been polished smooth on two of its four faces, not by ancient ritual or careful dressing, but by generations of cattle using it as a scratching post. The north and south faces of the stone are worked to a relative smoothness, while the east and west faces remain rough. The livestock have also worn a shallow circular depression into the ground around the base, a worn ring roughly 2.5 metres across and up to 0.4 metres deep, a kind of accidental monument to repeated, mundane use laid on top of a much older one.

The stone itself is a modest but carefully made object. Cut from granite with a square base measuring 25 centimetres on each side, it tapers upward to a semi-rounded top and stands 1.4 metres high. It sits at the eastern end of a low, narrow pasture ridge, positioned on a grass-covered oval mound measuring roughly 20 metres east to west and 12 metres north to south, rising to between 0.2 and 0.7 metres above the surrounding ground. Whether the mound is a natural feature adapted for the stone's erection or a constructed platform is not certain, but the pairing of standing stone and low earthen mound is a recognised pattern in Irish prehistoric landscapes. The Slate River runs approximately 100 metres to the north, crossing the flood-plain to the south-west, while the embankment of the Grand Canal's Athy Branch sits just 30 metres to the south, a nineteenth-century civil engineering project pressing close against something considerably older. The canal's construction would have transformed this stretch of the midlands, yet the stone endured, absorbed into farmland, put to practical use by animals that have no particular interest in prehistory.