That regularity is, of course, entirely deliberate. Standing stones, the most elemental of prehistoric monuments, were raised across Ireland over several millennia, their purposes ranging from the territorial to the ritual, though in most individual cases the precise reason remains genuinely unknown. What is unusual here is the combination of height, the careful rectangular base plan measuring roughly 1.48 metres by half a metre, and the visible packing stones wedged around the base, the ancient equivalent of concrete footings, suggesting that whoever erected it intended it to last.

The stone sits near the summit of a ridge on the Iveragh Peninsula, the broad arm of land in County Kerry that carries the Ring of Kerry road around its edge. From that elevated position it looks out over Lough Currane to the southeast, a lake that itself has its own long history of human activity. The stone is recorded and measured in Aidan O'Sullivan and John Sheehan's archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996, which remains one of the more thorough regional surveys of its kind for south Kerry. The packing stones visible at the base are a useful reminder that prehistoric monument-building was practical as well as symbolic; keeping a four-tonne pillar vertical for several thousand years requires more than ambition.