That secondary life, face-down underfoot, is precisely what saved its best carvings from destruction. The paradox of preservation through neglect is one of the more quietly satisfying details in Irish archaeology, and this small stone offers a neat illustration of it.

The stone was unearthed during excavations at Togherstown, on the northern slopes of the Hill of Uisneach in County Westmeath, carried out by R.A.S. Macalister and R.L. Praeger between 1929 and 1931. Their report, published in 1931, noted that the fragment, measuring approximately 38 by 36 by 10 centimetres and broken from a larger stone somewhere nearby, had been repurposed as paving in the courtyard of an early medieval ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common across Ireland from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries. The carvers of the original stone were working in a much earlier period entirely. The decoration consists of cup-and-ring marks, a form of prehistoric rock art in which a shallow circular depression, the cup, is surrounded by one or more incised concentric rings, the meaning of which remains genuinely unknown. On the bevelled edge of the stone, which lay face-down and was therefore best protected, two such motifs survive: one complete cup-mark of about 3 centimetres across enclosed by two concentric rings, and beside it the partial remains of a second, larger design cut off by the broken edge. On the opposite face, more worn from its years as a walking surface, a central cup-mark of similar size is encircled by five concentric arcs, the outermost reaching a diameter of around 20 centimetres. A third surface, on which Macalister recorded spirals, was re-examined in 2001 and found to be naturally weathered rather than carved; red chalk lines added to emphasise the supposed motifs had simply followed existing pits in the rock.

The stone is now held in Dublin South City rather than at its findspot in Westmeath, so visiting Togherstown itself will not bring you face to face with it. Anyone wishing to examine the carvings directly would need to trace its current institutional location. The 2001 re-examination, documented by O'Reilly in 2010, is the most detailed recent assessment of what the stone actually shows, and that publication is worth consulting before any visit, not least because it clarifies which surfaces are genuinely carved and which are the product of enthusiastic chalk and wishful thinking.