This one, however, is almost certainly a scratching post for cattle. That is not a dismissal. It is, in its own way, the more interesting story: a stone that spent years sitting in the archaeological record, unlisted on the Ordnance Survey's historic maps, waiting for someone to dig around its base and find out what it actually was.

The stone came to official attention not through any antiquarian survey but through infrastructure work, specifically the Bórd Gáis Éireann Curraleigh West-Limerick gas pipeline. When the corridor was being fenced in 1986, the stone was left standing three metres from the fence line, and archaeologist Barra Ó Donnabháin opened a four-metre-square cutting around it to investigate. What he found was instructive. The socket, the hole into which a genuine prehistoric standing stone would typically have been set with considerable depth and deliberate packing, was only twelve centimetres wider than the stone itself and just forty-five centimetres deep. The topsoil was exceptionally thin, and the small finds recovered from the surrounding soil were almost entirely of modern date. The one anomaly was a small yellow glass bead, a modest puzzle in an otherwise unremarkable assemblage. Ó Donnabháin noted that the stone itself was long and thin and very neatly quarried, and concluded it may well be a modern scratching post, a purpose-cut stone erected after 1700 to give livestock something to rub against. The current assessment, compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded to the record in April 2021, follows that interpretation.

The stone sits in pasture roughly twenty metres north of the R512, and is visible on satellite imagery. There are no formal access arrangements, and the surrounding land is agricultural and in active use, so anyone curious enough to seek it out should be mindful of that. Associated enclosure features recorded in the same area lie about 195 metres to the north-east, and the broader landscape does have genuine archaeological interest. The stone itself, though, rewards a particular kind of attention: the kind that finds something telling in what an excavation does not find, and in the quiet comedy of a farm convenience that fooled, briefly, the archaeological record.