On a north-facing slope in Glenacarney, in north Cork, a prehistoric stone lies flat on the ground beside a field fence, measuring 1.7 metres in length and roughly 40 by 30 centimetres in cross-section. It is not a ruin in the conventional sense; nothing has collapsed or crumbled. The stone was simply moved, some time around 1978, to its current position at the pasture's edge, where it has remained ever since, horizontal and quietly anomalous.

The stone may have a longer paper trail than its modest dimensions suggest. In 1934, a researcher named Bowman recorded two standing stones on land belonging to a James Curtin in this area, describing them as roughly two and a half feet high and seven feet in girth. If the Glenacarney stone is one of those two, it was upright within living memory of that record, and had presumably been so for centuries beforehand. Standing stones of this kind are a common feature of the Irish prehistoric landscape, raised for purposes that remain debated, whether as territorial markers, ritual focal points, or components of now-vanished monument complexes. What is less common is being able to pinpoint, even approximately, the year a stone of such antiquity was laid down by human hands rather than time.