But the standing stone at Ballyarthur in north County Cork carries the particular quiet weight that these prehistoric monuments tend to accumulate over millennia, occupying the same south-facing slope long after whatever ceremony or boundary-marking or astronomical observation first prompted someone to haul it upright has been entirely forgotten.

The stone itself is modest in scale but well-defined in shape: rectangular in plan, measuring 1.36 metres in height, roughly half a metre wide and just over forty centimetres deep, with its long axis running north to south. Standing stones, sometimes called galláin in Irish, were erected across Ireland from the Neolithic period onwards, though most are associated with the Bronze Age. They served purposes that varied from site to site and are still debated, including territorial markers, burial indicators, and astronomical alignments. This one gives little away beyond its dimensions and orientation, sitting on a south-facing slope in the kind of rough, unimproved grazing land that has a tendency to preserve what more intensively farmed ground would have destroyed.