The one at Smartcastle, in a quiet river valley in County Kilkenny, does the opposite. Hemmed in by a sheer rock face roughly twenty metres to its south and with limited views in every direction, it occupies a narrow strip of rough pasture between that cliff and a river to its north. Whatever its original purpose, the setting feels enclosed and almost private, as though the stone was deliberately placed out of sight rather than in prospect.

The stone itself is 2.2 metres tall and made of grey conglomerate, a rock type formed from compressed pebbles and sediment, some of which are still faintly visible in its surface. It tapers from a broad rectangular base towards a flat but angled top, with the highest point on the south-east side sloping away to the north-west. There is also a slight outward bulge on the north-east face, about 0.9 metres above ground level, suggesting either a natural irregularity in the rock or a consequence of weathering over a considerable span of time. No packing stones are visible around its base. By the time the first edition Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1840, a flour mill, mill pond, and mill race sat roughly ninety metres to the east, and several other buildings appear in the vicinity on both that map and its revised edition, none of which are still standing. The stone, for all its apparent ancientness, has outlasted the working infrastructure that once surrounded it.