The example at Ballindeenisk in County Cork is a notably substantial one, a rectangular slab rising 2.25 metres out of a south-south-west-facing pasture slope, its long axis oriented northeast to southwest and its profile tapering as it climbs. At roughly 1.3 metres wide but only 0.25 metres thick, it reads less as a boulder and more as something deliberately shaped, or at least deliberately selected, for its flat, blade-like proportions.

Standing stones of this type are generally understood to date from the Bronze Age, though pinning them to a specific century is rarely possible without excavation. They were erected singly or in loose groupings across the Irish countryside, and while some may have marked boundaries, burial sites, or routeways, others resist any tidy functional explanation. What makes the Ballindeenisk stone worth pausing over is simply its scale and its particularity: a large, carefully oriented slab set into a hillside pasture, still upright after what may be three or four thousand years in the ground.