What makes it worth pausing over is a single cupmark pressed into its western face. Cupmarks are shallow, roughly circular depressions pecked into stone by prehistoric hands, and while their precise purpose remains debated, they appear across the ancient landscape of Ireland and beyond, most often on standing stones and rock outcrops. Here, just one mark, on one face, oriented away from the dawn.

The stone itself is 1.7 metres tall and leans slightly to the west. At its base it measures 0.9 metres across and 0.15 metres deep, broad and slab-like rather than the more needle-like profile you sometimes encounter with standing stones elsewhere. Its alignment runs roughly NNW to SSE. It sits 1.5 metres from the southern side of the enclosure entrance, a position that feels deliberate rather than incidental, as though it was placed to be encountered at a threshold. The details come from the archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, a thorough reckoning with a landscape that holds an extraordinary density of early monuments.

The Iveragh Peninsula, perhaps better known to most people as the Ring of Kerry, contains one of the highest concentrations of prehistoric and early medieval field monuments in the country. Standing stones, or gallauns as they are known locally in Kerry, appear throughout this landscape, often in association with enclosures, burial sites, or townland boundaries. Whether they served a ritual, commemorative, or territorial function, or some shifting combination of all three across centuries of reuse, is rarely clear. What is clear is that someone once stood at this stone and made a mark on it, and that the stone and the mark are still here.