It is pyramidal in shape, just a metre high, and made of quartzite, a hard crystalline rock that resists weathering and gives the stone a pale, almost luminous quality in certain light. Standing stones like this one are among the most enigmatic monuments in the Irish landscape. They were erected across a broad span of prehistory, most commonly during the Bronze Age, and their purposes remain genuinely unclear, ranging from territorial markers to ritual focal points to memorials for the dead.

What makes this particular stone quietly interesting is its immediate company. Just to the west, along the shoreline, lies a midden, which is essentially an ancient rubbish heap, typically composed of discarded shellfish remains, animal bones, and other domestic debris left by coastal communities over long periods of time. Middens are valuable archaeological sites precisely because they preserve organic material that rarely survives elsewhere, offering a picture of diet, seasons, and settlement patterns. The proximity of this standing stone to such a deposit does not establish a direct connection between the two, but it does hint at a stretch of coastline that was, at some point, lived in and worked. The Clifden Bay shoreline at Faul was not simply a place people passed through.