At a mountain gap in County Waterford, a lone standing stone occupies one of those in-between places that prehistoric monuments seem to favour: not a summit, not a valley floor, but a threshold. Bearna na Madra, whose name translates roughly as the Gap of the Dogs, is a pass through the Monavullagh Mountains, with the land rising sharply to either side, a shoulder of the mountain climbing around 170 metres higher some 750 metres to the north, and another rising roughly 100 metres over a distance of about 900 metres to the south. The stone stands in this corridor, framed by higher ground on both sides.

What makes the site a little more complicated than a straightforward prehistoric monolith is what is not there. The Reverend Patrick Power, writing in his study of the placenames of the Decies, published in 1952 by Cork University Press, noted that two further stones were said to have lain prone in the vicinity of the standing stone. Prone stones are not unusual in themselves; many prehistoric standing stones have fallen or been toppled over the centuries, and some monuments were always intended as recumbent. But when the site has been examined more recently, no trace of these additional stones has been found. Whether Power was working from older local tradition, an earlier written source, or a misreading of the landscape is now difficult to say. The standing stone itself remains, but the claimed companions have left no evidence behind them.