The granite monolith at Knickeen in County Wicklow does the opposite, widening from a base just over a metre across to more than two metres at the top, giving it a slightly top-heavy, almost precarious look that is not easily forgotten. It stands 2.37 metres high, its long axis running east to west, set on level ground among forestry.

What makes the stone genuinely remarkable is not its unusual proportions but the inscription carved along its north-east edge. Cut in ogham, an early medieval script in which letters are represented by groups of notches and strokes made along a central stemline, the text reads MAQI NILI. The formula is a familiar one in the ogham corpus: MAQI means "son of" in Old Irish, making this a memorial or identifier reading "son of Nili", a personal name otherwise unattested in great numbers. The reading was established by R. A. S. Macalister, whose 1945 corpus of Irish ogham inscriptions remains a foundational reference, and the stone carries the number 51 in that catalogue. More recently it has been documented by the Ogham in 3D project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which uses photogrammetry to produce precise digital models of ogham stones, preserving details that centuries of weathering might otherwise erase. Granite is a harder and less porous material than the sandstones more commonly used for ogham inscriptions, which may account for the survival of the lettering on this exposed and relatively isolated monument.