The upright stone at Portloman in County Westmeath sits on a slight rise in otherwise level pasture, standing roughly 1.5 metres tall, rectangular in plan, and worn smooth along its sides by generations of livestock doing exactly what livestock do. A shallow groove has been cut into the top, and the ground around the base has been hollowed out by the steady press of hooves. It has the appearance of an ancient monument. The evidence, however, is less obliging.

When surveyors examined the stone in 1983, they noted it was of doubtful antiquity. Neither the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map nor the revised 1913 twenty-five-inch edition shows any antiquity at this location, which is telling, since standing stones of genuine prehistoric origin were typically noted by nineteenth-century surveyors even when their significance was imperfectly understood. The absence from both editions points toward a more mundane origin. A scratching post, a term for a stone or post set deliberately in a field to let cattle relieve themselves against it, would need no cartographic commemoration. What makes the Portloman stone more intriguing rather than less is that a second possible standing stone lies roughly 195 metres to the north-west. Whether that neighbour is genuinely ancient is also unresolved, and the two sit in a kind of ambiguous company, each uncertain, each awaiting a more definitive answer than the record has yet managed to provide.