This one, standing in pasture on a north-facing slope at Curraghard in County Cork, is a sub-rectangular block roughly one and a half metres tall, its long axis oriented northeast to southwest, and leaning slightly northward, whether from centuries of ground movement or the slow persuasion of gravity is impossible to say. It measures 1.38 metres by 0.42 metres, solid and unadorned, the kind of object that rewards a second look precisely because it offers so little obvious explanation.

Standing stones of this type appear throughout Cork and across Ireland more broadly, and their purposes remain genuinely unresolved. Some are thought to have marked boundaries, routeways, or burial sites; others may have had astronomical or ceremonial functions. Without excavation or associated finds, any individual stone keeps its secrets. What can be said of the Curraghard stone is that someone, at some point in prehistory, went to considerable effort to select, transport, and erect it on this particular slope, facing this particular direction. The northeast-to-southwest orientation is not unusual among Irish standing stones, and has led some researchers to speculate about solar alignments, though such theories remain contested.