It is not the first prehistoric monument to be repurposed by later farming practicalities, but something about this one gives pause. At its base, a natural perforation, roughly twenty by thirty-five centimetres, opens clean through the stone, as if the rock had been selected precisely because of this accidental eye. The block tapers as it rises, leans slightly to the north-east, and has probably stood on this ridge, in one capacity or another, since prehistory.

The stone is an upright of the kind typically described as a standing stone, a broad category covering single monoliths erected across Ireland from the Neolithic through the early medieval period, their exact purposes debated but often associated with burial, boundary-marking, or ceremonial use. What makes the Cloonconragh example particularly suggestive is its company. About forty metres to the north sits a rath, the circular earthwork enclosure that was the standard defended farmstead of early medieval Ireland. Some two hundred metres to the north-east lies a fulacht fia, a type of ancient cooking site identified by its characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt and fire-cracked stone, usually associated with Bronze Age activity. The three monuments together point to sustained human presence on this ridge across a very long span of time. The ridge itself may have been part of the appeal: the views from this elevation take in Nephin Mountain to the north-west and Croagh Patrick to the west, two of the most prominent landmarks in the Mayo landscape, both of which carried their own significance long before the Christian era.