In the old burial ground of Killeen Cormac, near Colbinstown in County Kildare, there is a standing stone whose most distinctive feature is a shallow hollow worn into its upper surface, roughly the size and shape of a large dog's footprint. That depression, measuring about nine centimetres by five centimetres and sunk four centimetres into the stone, has been known for well over a century simply as the Hound's Paw.

The stone itself is a tapering, lichen-covered slab of greenish flagstone, standing 0.82 metres high, broader at the base and narrowing toward a top that tilts gently downward from east to west. It sits to the north-east of the centre of the burial ground, a site with its own considerable antiquity. The earliest published record of the pillar comes from Fitzgerald, writing between 1899 and 1902, who noted both the stone and the curious oval impression that gives it its name. Whether the hollow is the result of deliberate carving, long ritual use, or simply the slow work of weather and erosion is not recorded; what survives is the description, the stone, and the name that has attached itself to the mark.

Killeen Cormac is an early ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of burial ground in Ireland where layers of use accumulate quietly over centuries, and where an unassuming pillar stone, easily overlooked among older graves, can carry a detail as oddly specific as a hound's footprint pressed into its face.