Yet that is more or less the situation in Belmullet, where a large prehistoric slab, more than three and a half metres long when laid flat, has had a distinctly eventful recent history on top of whatever centuries passed before anyone thought to write it down.

The stone originally occupied the highest point of a low hill in the town, with Trawmore Bay visible to the south-west and the inner reaches of Broadhaven Bay opening to the north-east. It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, though by the 1921 edition it is marked plainly as a standing stone, suggesting it was either newly noticed or newly re-erected at some point in the intervening decades. When inspectors examined it in 1995, it stood upright at 1.7 metres above ground, built into a modern field boundary running north-west to south-east, with several smaller buttressing stones packed around its base. The local tradition attached to its position is specific: the spot was said to mark the grave of a chieftain who died fighting Munstermen during a cattle raid, the kind of inter-provincial raiding that was a feature of early Irish society for centuries. By 2005, when construction of a housing estate displaced it, the stone had already fallen and was lying on the ground. Once horizontal, it revealed something the upright position had concealed: lichen and weathering covered roughly half its total length, confirming which portion had stood above the soil. Marks visible around the midpoint of the stone were identified locally as scorch marks from a fire at a factory that had stood nearby.

Because re-erecting the stone on its original site was no longer possible, it was raised again at a new location approximately 120 metres to the west-south-west. It stands there now, displaced but upright, carrying its fire marks and its old associations into a setting that is entirely of the twenty-first century.