It is modest by any measure, standing just 0.65 metres high and measuring 0.7 metres by 0.3 metres, but its vertical fracture gives it an oddly deliberate quality, the kind of feature that makes you wonder whether time or human hands were responsible.

What makes it stranger still is its absence from the historical record. Neither the 1842 nor the 1904 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, the standard tools for tracking such monuments across the Irish landscape, show any mark at this location. A stone that predates those surveys by an unknown span of centuries was simply passed over, unrecorded by the cartographers who catalogued so much else. It did, however, carry a name in local memory. Writing in 1934, a researcher named Bowman recorded it as 'Carrig a Mhaolin', meaning Moylan's rock, a personal name attached to an ancient object in the way that Irish townland tradition so often preserved what formal surveys missed. Who Moylan was, or what connection he or she had to this particular outcrop on a north Cork hillside, is no longer known.