Yet this low standing stone at An Com, on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, has been holding its ground for millennia, oriented along a NNW-SSE axis and looking out over low-lying land towards Ballinskelligs Bay to the south-east.

The stone is what archaeologists call an orthostat, a single upright slab set into the ground, of the kind erected across Ireland during the Bronze Age, though the precise date of this one is unrecorded. At just over a metre tall, 62 centimetres wide, and only 16 centimetres thick at its base, it is a relatively modest example, weathered and fissured across its surface in the way that millennia of Atlantic exposure tend to produce. A single packing stone, used to stabilise and secure the orthostat in the ground when it was first raised, remains visible on its north-western side. That small detail is a quiet reminder that someone, at some point in the distant past, took considerable care in placing it exactly here, in this particular spot above the bay.