The one at Cousane, in West Cork, is more understated than that. It sits on top of a low, heath-covered knoll, square in cross-section rather than the irregular slab shape more commonly associated with prehistoric monuments, and measures just under a metre in height with each face roughly forty centimetres across. That compact, almost tidy geometry is quietly unusual.

The stone is aligned along a north-south axis, a characteristic shared by many standing stones across Munster, though whether such orientations reflect astronomical observation, territorial marking, or something else entirely remains a matter of ongoing discussion among archaeologists. Standing stones as a class are notoriously difficult to date with precision; without associated finds or a datable context, most are assigned broadly to the Bronze Age, somewhere between four and two thousand years before the present. What is clear is that someone, at some point in prehistory, chose this particular knoll in Cousane as the right place to set a dressed, symmetrical stone upright in the ground, and that it has remained there ever since.