The one at Clonhasten in County Wexford complicates that assumption considerably. Rather than commanding an open hilltop or marking a Bronze Age burial, this modest slab of schist, just over a metre tall and roughly half a metre wide, sits quietly in established woodland on a steep north-facing slope. It does not appear on any nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey mapping; the first cartographic record of it dates only to the 1940 edition of the OS six-inch map, which is an unusually late entry for a monument of its type and one that raises questions about what, exactly, it is meant to commemorate.

The stone stands on the south side of the more northerly of two east-west lanes running through the wood, with the River Slaney lying some three hundred metres to the north. The woodland itself predates 1839, which means it was already well established when Victorian cartographers were first systematically recording the Irish landscape, yet the stone escaped their attention. Schist is a metamorphic rock with a naturally layered, flaky structure, and this particular example is aligned along an east-west axis. What makes the Clonhasten stone genuinely puzzling is its association with a series of enclosures in the surrounding wood and its proximity to the former site of Greenmount House. The prevailing interpretation is that it may form part of an ornamental landscape, the kind of carefully arranged grounds that Georgian and early nineteenth-century landowners sometimes laid out with artificial ruins, decorative stonework, and contrived vistas. If that reading is correct, then this is less an ancient monument than a piece of designed scenery, a landowner's gesture towards antiquity rather than antiquity itself. That ambiguity, whether it is genuinely old or a knowing imitation of age, is precisely what makes it worth attention.