The one on the high ground between Cullentragh Big and Ballybraid in County Wicklow carries the quiet ambiguity of a monument that looks ancient but probably is not. It first appears on the 1908 to 1909 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, and the suspicion is that the surveyors themselves put it there, a practical marker planted to define the boundary between two townlands rather than to honour the dead or track the movement of the sun.

The Ordnance Survey of Ireland, which mapped the country in extraordinary detail from the 1820s onwards, was not above using physical stones to fix points of administrative geography on the ground. A boundary marker on elevated terrain served an obvious purpose, visible across open land and difficult to argue with. The irony is that such stones, stripped of any prehistoric context, can still read as ancient to a passing eye, sitting on hillsides in the same postures as their genuinely prehistoric neighbours, accumulating the same lichens and the same local silence.