It is the kind of object that could pass for a forgotten gatepost or field marker to an inattentive eye, yet it is a standing stone, one of the thousands of prehistoric upright stones erected across Ireland whose precise purposes remain debated. What makes this particular example quietly curious is its cartographic history: it was recorded and named on the 1838 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan Map, the detailed working document produced during the first systematic mapping of Ireland, but then disappeared from every subsequent edition of the standard OS six-inch maps. Something was noticed once, and then, in the official record at least, quietly forgotten.

The 1838 date places its first documentation in the middle of the great Ordnance Survey project, which sent teams of surveyors across the country to produce the first large-scale maps of Ireland at six inches to the mile. The Fair Plan was a preparatory stage in that process, an annotated working sheet rather than a finished publication, which may partly explain why a detail recorded there did not always carry forward into the printed editions. Whether the stone was simply overlooked in subsequent revisions, or whether surveyors later judged it too ambiguous to label with confidence, is impossible to say. The stone itself is limestone, a material common to the midlands geology of Westmeath, and its tapering rectangular form is consistent with standing stones found elsewhere in the Irish landscape, though the dates of such monuments vary enormously, ranging from the Neolithic through to the early medieval period.