No enclosure, no interpretive panel, no obvious reason why this particular field on a north-west-facing hillside should hold something several thousand years old. Yet here it stands, oriented along a north-north-east to south-south-west axis, its long face measuring roughly ninety centimetres across and only thirty centimetres deep, a flat upright blade rather than a rounded pillar.

Standing stones of this kind are scattered across West Cork in considerable numbers, and their purpose remains genuinely uncertain. Some alignments correspond loosely to solar or lunar events; others may have marked boundaries, graves, or routeways. The Irish place name An Tóchar, meaning a causeway or tochar road, a type of ancient trackway sometimes constructed across boggy ground, hints at a landscape that has been crossed and marked by people for a very long time. Whether the stone and the place name are connected in any meaningful way is not recorded, but the coincidence is worth holding in mind while looking at it.