Most survive in open fields or on hillsides, weathered but essentially unchanged in purpose. The example at Emper in County Westmeath occupies a stranger situation: it stands inside a ringfort, which raises the immediate question of whether it was ever meant to be there at all, or whether it arrived, so to speak, by accident of later use.

The stone is modest in height, measuring around 1.1 metres, and sits within the southern quadrant of a ringfort, the kind of enclosed circular earthwork that was a standard form of rural settlement across early medieval Ireland, typically dating to between the seventh and tenth centuries. A second ringfort lies roughly 120 metres to the south-east. What complicates any tidy reading of the Emper stone is the suggestion that it may have been re-used as a scratching post, most likely by livestock. That small detail shifts the tone considerably. A prehistoric standing stone, possibly ancient when the ringfort was constructed around it or nearby, has apparently spent some portion of its existence as agricultural furniture, a convenient upright for cattle to rub against in a waterlogged Westmeath field. The surrounding landscape, gently rolling grassland with poorly drained, rushy ground, is exactly the kind of setting where cattle would seek out any available solid surface.

The classification of the stone as "possible" rather than certain reflects a real difficulty in Irish field archaeology: a stone of this height, standing upright in the ground, could be a genuine prehistoric monument or it could be a much later field clearance stone set on end for convenience. The presence of the ringfort nearby neither confirms nor rules out an earlier ceremonial function. What it does suggest is that this corner of Westmeath has been continuously shaped by human activity across at least two distinct periods, and that the boundaries between monument and mundane object can, over enough time, become genuinely difficult to draw.