Standing just over a metre tall in the south-western corner of the Killeen Cormac burial ground in County Kildare, a tapering lozenge-shaped pillar stone occupies a spot that most visitors to the site are unlikely to notice. It is not a dramatic monument. Its four faces measure only a few centimetres across at the narrowest points, and the top along with the northern and eastern corners are gradually flaking away. What makes it quietly significant is its form and its context: a dressed, deliberately shaped upright stone placed within one of the more unusually named early burial grounds in Leinster.

Killeen Cormac, which gives its name to the enclosure, is a site with deep early medieval associations, the word "killeen" typically referring in Irish placename tradition to a small church or burial ground, often one used for unbaptised children or for burials outside formal ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The pillar stone itself was first recorded by Fitzgerald in the period 1899 to 1902, making it part of a broader antiquarian effort to document the standing stones and early Christian remains of Kildare during that era. Pillar stones of this kind, plain upright slabs without inscription or carving, are thought in many cases to mark graves or to have served as boundary or commemorative markers within early ecclesiastical enclosures, though their precise function at any individual site is rarely certain.