But look closely and the inscription still legible on its face, "12 From Gort", quietly confirms that this stone has been measuring out the same stretch of County Galway for the better part of three centuries. Faint traces of white paint cling to the surface, a ghost of the practical maintenance once applied to keep the figures readable to travellers on horseback or in carriages. The top of the pillar has spalled badly over time, a term for the flaking and fracturing of stone through weathering, which has partly obliterated the numerals, so the distance must now be read as much by inference as by sight.

This stone is one of nine 18th-century milestones that once lined the old road between Gort and Galway, a route that predates the modern highway network and whose alignment is now traceable largely through these surviving markers. The pillar itself is well-dressed and trapezoidal in cross-section, slightly wider at the back than the front, with a narrow chamfer running along the front margins. It was significant enough to be marked on the 1922 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, noted simply as "M.S.", suggesting it was still a recognised feature of the landscape well into the twentieth century. Research by the Ardrahan Heritage Group has documented the full series of nine stones, placing this one within a coherent picture of how the road was engineered and signed for long-distance travel in the Georgian period.

When the stone was inspected in November 2021, it had been temporarily lifted from its original position by Galway County Council and moved into the adjacent field to the east. Whether it has since been returned to the verge is not certain. The old road itself is the thing worth seeking out here; the milestone sits on its eastern side, and the landscape around Rooaunmore retains something of the character of a route designed for a slower, more measured kind of movement, one that needed stones like this to tell you exactly how far you had come.