That small detail, unheroic and entirely agricultural, is one of the more honest things you can say about a standing stone: however ancient its origins, it has spent most of its existence in a working landscape, quietly accumulating the marks of ordinary life.

This limestone orthostat in Springfield, County Tipperary stands 1.45 metres tall on a slightly elevated part of an otherwise rough and poorly drained pasture field. An orthostat is simply an upright stone set into the ground, and this one is rectangular in plan, roughly 0.4 metres long and up to 0.25 metres thick, with its long axis running north to south. It leans very slightly to the east. The flat top and smoothed corners speak to long contact with livestock, and the ground immediately around its base has been pressed into a gentle hollow, roughly 4 metres east to west and 3.5 metres north to south, by generations of animals gathering near it. A second standing stone lies approximately 280 metres to the north, suggesting this part of Tipperary was, at some point in prehistory, a landscape with more than one such marker in it, though what relationship the two stones once held, if any, is not recorded.