Yet this rectangular monolith at Derreenataggart Middle has been standing here, aligned east-northeast to west-southwest, for millennia, overlooking the harbour town of Castletown Bearhaven below.

Standing stones are among the more enigmatic survivals of prehistoric Ireland. Erected singly or in groups, they are thought to date broadly to the Bronze Age, though their precise purposes remain debated. Some appear to mark boundaries or routeways; others may have had ceremonial or astronomical significance. This particular example, recorded by O'Brien in 1970, is a notably slender specimen given its height: at 3.2 metres tall but only half a metre wide and barely 0.15 metres deep, it reads almost like a finger of stone rather than a slab. Its placement on a natural rock outcrop rather than dug directly into soil is worth noting, and its orientation along an ENE-WSW axis follows a pattern seen in other standing stones across the region, though what that alignment once meant to the people who raised it is not something the stone itself is giving away.