The arrangement at Skeheen, in Co. Westmeath, is a little more ambiguous than that. Twelve low rounded boulders sit on the surface of poorly drained grassland, forming a rough circle roughly seven metres across, with a single small upright stone at its centre. None of the boulders appear to be set into sockets, and the central stone is not securely anchored in the ground either. That detail, combined with the rounded, almost casual shape of the boulders and the way they rest rather than stand, has led those who have examined the site to question whether this is genuinely a prehistoric monument at all.

True prehistoric stone circles, of which Ireland has several hundred, are typically characterised by carefully selected stones placed in dug sockets, oriented with deliberate precision relative to solar or lunar events. The Skeheen arrangement, with its maximum boulder height of just 0.8 metres and stones spaced loosely between 0.6 and 1.3 metres apart, does not obviously conform to that tradition. The site sits immediately north-northeast of a possible moated site, a category of monument usually associated with Anglo-Norman settlement from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, consisting of a raised platform surrounded by a water-filled ditch. Whether that proximity is coincidental or says something about the age and purpose of the stone arrangement is not clear. The doubt about the circle's antiquity is genuine, which in its own way makes Skeheen an interesting case: a monument that prompts the question of when, exactly, something qualifies as archaeology.