Set into the stonework of a house that stands beside the site of a former castle, a single stone bears the numerals 1586 in relief, meaning the figures were not cut into the surface but raised up from it, the surrounding material worked away to leave them standing proud. It is the kind of detail that most passers-by would miss entirely, yet it anchors this corner of the Kerry peninsula to a very specific moment in the sixteenth century.

The stone almost certainly originated with the castle it now neighbours, or with the wider structure of which that castle was a part. The year 1586 places it squarely in a turbulent period for Munster, coming just a few years after the Desmond Rebellions and the subsequent Munster Plantation, when land ownership across the province was being violently redistributed and new English settlers were beginning to arrive. Whether the date commemorates a construction, a renovation, or simply the marking of ownership is not recorded, but the impulse to cut a year into stone was common among those who built in a period of change and wished to leave some trace of themselves behind. The stone was later removed from its original context and worked into the wall of the adjacent house, a fate that was not unusual for dressed or inscribed stonework when older buildings were demolished or fell into ruin and their materials were put to new use.