At Cúil An Mhothair in County Cork, that is precisely what happened. A prehistoric standing stone, just under two metres tall, narrow and blade-like at roughly ninety centimetres wide and only twenty centimetres thick, now sits incorporated into an east-west field wall on a steep south-facing slope above the valley of the Douglas River. The stone is orientated on a northeast-southwest axis, which means it cuts across the field boundary at an angle rather than running neatly with it, a small but telling sign that the wall was built around the stone rather than the stone placed to serve the wall.

Standing stones of this kind are among the most common and least understood prehistoric monuments in Ireland. They appear across the landscape in their thousands, and while some are associated with burial sites or ceremonial alignments, many were erected for reasons that remain genuinely unclear. Their dates are difficult to pin down without excavation, though most are thought to belong broadly to the Bronze Age. What is clear at this particular site is that by the time someone was laying out field boundaries here, the stone was already old enough, or significant enough, to be worked around rather than removed. The slope it stands on looks south across the Douglas River valley, which may or may not have mattered to whoever first raised it. The surrounding field boundary is now largely hidden beneath briars and bushes, leaving the stone itself as the most legible feature in an otherwise overgrown stretch of rough pasture.