Its neighbour, embedded in the adjoining house, is even less visible: according to local information, it has been plastered over entirely, sealed behind a layer of render and effectively lost to casual observation. Two markers, side by side, one just about legible to the world and one quietly entombed.

Boundary stones were used to demarcate the edges of parishes, townlands, estates, or urban jurisdictions, and the pair at Knockrea are believed to date to the 17th century, a period when the delineation of land ownership and administrative territory in Ireland carried considerable legal and political weight. Cork city was expanding and reorganising during this period, and markers like these would have served as fixed, physical anchors for boundaries that might otherwise exist only on paper or in memory. That two of them survive in situ on the same stretch of road, incorporated into the fabric of domestic buildings, suggests the houses were built around or against them rather than the stones being moved to suit the buildings.

The visible stone is accessible in the sense that it sits in a public-facing wall, though it is set within a private residential property. The plastered-over companion is, for now at least, a matter of local knowledge rather than direct inspection, present but invisible, which gives the pair a quietly curious quality: one marker still doing something like its original job of announcing a boundary, the other having had a boundary of its own drawn over it.