The one at Cloghbrack, in the townland of Lissanacody in County Galway, does something different. It is wider than it is tall, a squat irregular granite boulder measuring a metre high but stretching to one and a half metres across and over a metre thick, aligned on an east-west axis and set on a small hillock amid undulating grassland. The effect is less a finger pointing at the sky than a presence hunkered into the land, as though it has no interest in being noticed from a distance.

Granite boulders of this kind were raised during prehistory, though the precise date and purpose of any individual standing stone is rarely recoverable. The east-west alignment is shared by many such monuments across Ireland and is often taken to suggest a concern with the movements of the sun, particularly at the equinoxes, though whether that was the intention at Cloghbrack is impossible to say with certainty. What is clear is that the stone has not sat alone for all of its life in quite the same way. Along its northern side lies a small pile of grass-covered boulders, the accumulated debris of centuries of field clearance by farmers working the surrounding land. That mound of cleared stone is its own quiet record, a reminder that this corner of Galway has been farmed and tended for a very long time, and that the prehistoric monument was simply absorbed into that longer agricultural rhythm rather than being removed or disturbed.