Standing stone, Dalystown, Co. Longford

The one at Dalystown, in County Longford, does nothing of the sort. It sits on wet, low-lying ground, a squat and rather unprepossessing block of stone that rises less than a metre from the earth. Its subrectangular shape tapers upward to a rough point, and it measures 0.9 metres high, 0.8 metres wide, and just 0.3 metres thick. What it lacks in drama it makes up for in quiet persistence.

The stone is aligned along a north-north-east to south-south-west axis, a characteristic it shares with many prehistoric standing stones across Ireland, some of which are thought to relate to solar or lunar orientations, though the precise reasons behind any individual alignment are rarely certain. At its base, a number of small packing-stones have been placed to keep it upright, a detail that hints at the practical work involved in its original erection and suggests it has been tended or stabilised at some point. The boggy ground around it is the kind of landscape that has preserved a great deal of Irish prehistory, swallowing and holding objects and structures that drier ground would long since have destroyed. Whether the stone was a boundary marker, a ritual site, or something else entirely, the record does not say.