In the old burial ground known as Killeen Cormac, near Colbinstown in County Kildare, a solitary stone stands rooted in the earth at a slight taper, broader at its base and narrowing as it rises just over a metre above the ground. It is thickly coated in lichen, which gives it the dull, mottled appearance of something very old and very patient. Pillar stones of this kind are among the more enigmatic survivals of early Irish archaeology; set upright into the ground without mortar or construction, they may have marked graves, boundaries, or places of ritual significance, though their precise function in any given case is rarely recoverable.

The stone was first recorded by Fitzgerald in the closing years of the nineteenth century, somewhere between 1899 and 1902, making it one of the earlier documented features of a burial ground that carries a distinctly ancient name. Killeen Cormac is an early ecclesiastical site with associations stretching back to the early Christian period in Ireland, and the pillar stone sits to the east of the centre of the enclosure. Its dimensions are modest but deliberate-seeming: a base measuring roughly 38 centimetres by 32 centimetres tapering to a narrower top of 35 centimetres by 15 centimetres, earthfast and immovable, the kind of object that tends to outlast any explanation of its original purpose.