The example at Leitry in West Cork stands roughly 1.1 metres high and about a metre wide, a broad, upright slab planted on a south-facing slope in land that has been recently reclaimed for agriculture. That last detail is quietly significant. Reclamation work, which typically involves draining, clearing, and turning over old bog or rough ground, is exactly the kind of activity that disturbs or destroys prehistoric monuments. The fact that this stone still stands, in ground that has been actively worked over, gives it a slightly unlikely quality.

Standing stones of this kind are scattered across Cork and the wider Irish landscape, and most defy easy interpretation. They are generally assigned a prehistoric date, somewhere within the Bronze Age being a common assumption, but without excavation it is rarely possible to say more than that. Some may have marked boundaries, routes, or burial sites; others may have served purposes that left no recoverable trace. This one, low and broad rather than the needle-thin type sometimes associated with Cork stone rows and alignments, sits in a landscape that has clearly been shaped and reshaped by the generations who farmed it, and yet it has persisted.