The one at Cappaboy Beg, in the upland country of west Cork near the head of the Owvane river valley, does something more quietly unsettling: it fits inside a space roughly the size of a large kitchen table. Five stones arranged in a circle with an internal span of just 2.3 metres along its main axis, the whole thing sitting in a working tillage field on a south-east-facing slope, as if it had simply always been there and the farming had grown up around it.

Five-stone circles are a distinctive type found almost exclusively in the Cork and Kerry region, and they follow a consistent logic: five uprights arranged so that the two tallest stones flank a low, flat axial stone directly opposite, with the axis of the whole structure aligned to a specific point on the horizon, often connected to the movements of the moon or the setting sun at particular times of year. At Cappaboy Beg the alignment runs north-east to south-west. The stones themselves are modest in individual size, ranging from half a metre to just over a metre in length and reaching no more than 0.9 metres in height, but their careful placement and orientation suggest deliberate, considered construction. The site was documented by Seán Ó Nualláin, whose systematic survey of Cork and Kerry stone circles in the early 1980s brought many such small monuments into clearer focus for the first time.