Standing stones are common enough features of the Irish landscape, but this one at Glennaphuca in County Waterford has a quietly particular character. Rather than the tall, blade-like profile that many people picture when they think of a prehistoric standing stone, this example is noticeably squat and broad, almost architectural in its proportions. Its square cross-section gives it a deliberate, planted quality, as though it was chosen precisely because it would not topple easily.

The stone is made of conglomerate, a sedimentary rock composed of rounded pebbles or fragments cemented together in a finer matrix, which gives it a rougher, more varied surface than the smooth-faced standing stones found elsewhere. It measures 0.7 metres by 0.65 metres at its base and rises to a height of 1.6 metres, oriented along a north-south axis. What makes it stranger still is the broad, flat crest at the top, measuring over a metre wide, which is considerably wider than the body of the stone itself. Whether this spreading crown is a natural feature of the rock or shaped by whoever erected it is not recorded. The stone sits towards the top of an east-facing slope at Glennaphuca, a name derived from the Irish for the valley of the púca, a shape-shifting spirit of Irish folklore, which adds a certain atmosphere to what is already an isolated and deliberately placed object.