A single upright stone on a gently south-facing plateau in Castlereagh, County Waterford, does not announce itself with any great drama. It stands just 1.3 metres tall, roughly the height of a garden wall, yet it has been placed with enough deliberateness to raise the question that standing stones always raise: why here, and why at all.

The stone itself is conglomerate, a rock type composed of older, rounded fragments cemented together over geological time, which gives it a rougher, more varied surface than the smooth schist or sandstone used at many comparable sites. Its cross-section is rectangular, measuring between 0.65 and 0.35 to 0.5 metres across, and it is oriented along an east-west axis. That alignment may be coincidental, or it may reflect the same broad concern with solar movement that shaped the positioning of countless other prehistoric standing stones across Ireland, though no specific function has been recorded for this one. Standing stones as a class were erected throughout the Bronze Age and possibly earlier, and their purposes appear to have varied, marking boundaries, graves, routeways, or ceremonial points in the landscape depending on the site.