Look closer, and it turns out to be a leacht cuimhne, a commemorative monument, built in a beehive shape from mortared limestone blocks. It measures roughly 2.6 metres in diameter and stands 2 metres high, well-preserved enough to retain a legible inscribed plaque set into its south-western face.

That plaque carries the date 1653 and records the names of James Lally and his family. The mid-seventeenth century was a particularly turbulent period in Connacht: the Cromwellian settlement of the early 1650s had upended land ownership and displaced many Gaelic and Old English families across the province, making personal commemoration in stone a quietly significant act. The Lally name, associated with the area around Tuam in north Galway, appears in a number of historical contexts from this period, though the monument itself gives no further biographical detail. The beehive or corbelled form, in which courses of stone are laid in narrowing rings to create a domed or conical profile without a keystone, has very old roots in Irish building tradition, and its use here lends the structure a gravity that goes well beyond a simple grave marker.