But the small megalithic structure at Ballyfroota, known locally as Clochavarra, carries an unusually layered biography. It is, at once, a probable prehistoric cromlech, a reputed cure for back pain, a resting place for coffins, and a carved stone whose Christian cross may link it to the old graveyard immediately behind it. Very few roadside monuments in County Limerick have managed to accumulate quite so many identities.

The name Clochavarra derives from the Irish Cloch a' Bhárraigh, meaning Barry's Stone, though the 1838 Ordnance Survey noted that cloch in this part of Ireland often referred to a stone building rather than a single stone. By 1840 the same surveyors were recording the monument as a Druid's Altar, reflecting the fashionable antiquarian vocabulary of the time. Writing in 1908, Lynch described it as the remains of a cromlech, a form of megalithic tomb in which a large flat capstone rests upon upright supporting stones, and noted that only three stones remained. The capstone, roughly 2.13 metres long and just 0.17 metres thick, had been broken and was held up by inserted rubble masonry. Lynch was fairly certain the stones had shifted from their original positions, most likely disturbed during road construction. He also recorded the folk cure associated with the structure: people suffering from back pain would visit and stoop beneath the covering stone, and Lynch speculated, drily, that it was precisely this belief that motivated the repairs and saved the monument from disappearing altogether. By 1982, De Valera and Ó Nualláin recorded a further tradition, that the structure had served as a leacht, a resting place where coffins were set down during funeral processions to the nearby graveyard, which lies only nine metres to the north. Carved into the underside of the broken western end of the capstone is a deep cross with expanded terminals; its date is uncertain, though it may be connected to that same graveyard.

The monument sits on the north side of a small east-west road that forms the boundary between the townlands of Ballyfroota and Ballingarry, close to Sliabh Riach and not far from Duntryleague. The Tobereendoney holy well lies roughly 95 metres to the west-northwest, making this a corner of the landscape with an unusual concentration of early religious and funerary sites. The carved cross is on the underside of the capstone, so you will need to crouch to see it properly, which is, given the monument's history, a fittingly appropriate posture.