The example at Dooneens in County Cork asks rather more of the observer. Only about half a metre of stone is visible above the grass, and even that modest projection comes with a caveat: surveyors working in the area suspected that the base of the stone is sod-covered, meaning the true height of the original monument may be considerably greater than what the eye can find.

The stone was recorded by archaeologists Quinn and Carroll in 2010, during a heritage assessment carried out in connection with a proposed wind farm at Dooneens. It sits in pasture land to the east-northeast of a cluster of hut sites nearby, a spatial relationship that may or may not be meaningful but is at least suggestive of a landscape that was once organised and inhabited in ways no longer obvious at ground level. Standing stones, as a category, are among the more enigmatic survivals of prehistoric Ireland. They have been associated variously with burial markers, territorial boundaries, and astronomical alignments, though in most individual cases the original purpose remains genuinely uncertain. At Dooneens, uncertainty runs deeper still: the stone was described only as a possible standing stone, its credentials as a deliberate upright monument rather than a naturally occurring rock not yet firmly established.