At Rockgrove in County Cork, that is precisely the situation. Quarrying has eaten away the ground on all sides, leaving the stone sitting roughly four to five metres above the current floor of the excavation, on what amounts to an isolated pedestal of uncut material. The workers went close enough on the south-west side to expose the stone's own base in the freshly cut section face, revealing that it extends almost a metre below the old ground surface.

The stone itself is not especially large, standing 1.58 metres tall, with a roughly rectangular cross-section measuring 1.33 metres by 0.28 metres. It leans noticeably to the south, its long axis running broadly north-east to south-west. Standing stones of this kind are found across Ireland, typically dating from the Bronze Age, though precise dating for any individual example is rarely straightforward in the absence of associated finds or excavation. What makes the Rockgrove stone unusual is not its form but its predicament. The quarrying that has gradually surrounded it has, inadvertently, preserved a record of how deeply it was set into the ground, while simultaneously placing it in a setting its original builders could not have imagined.