This gabled orthostat, standing just one metre high and aligned northwest to southeast, is all that remains visible of what local tradition called a ‘Druid’s Altar’. The stone sits incorporated into a grass-grown field bank about 5.5 kilometres east of the inner end of the lough, commanding extensive views across the water from its elevated position.

Historical records paint a picture of a much grander site. When antiquarian Thomas Fagan visited in 1846, he documented two upright stones standing about 2.15 metres apart, which he interpreted as the remnants of ‘a pagan altar or sepulture’. Early Ordnance Survey maps from the 1830s and 1840s show something even more intriguing; a substantial cairn or mound roughly 40 metres long and 15 metres wide at this location. The second standing stone appears to have survived into the early 20th century, as the 1905 Ordnance Survey still marked the site as ‘Standing Stones’, plural.

The surviving stone’s gabled shape and its position relative to where the long cairn once stood strongly suggest this was the backstone of a gallery, most likely part of a court tomb or possibly a portal tomb. The cairn itself has vanished, its stones probably incorporated into the field bank that now crosses the site. Four larger displaced stones scattered along the bank, along with numerous smaller field stones, hint at the monument’s former complexity. While its exact nature remains unclassified, this lonely sentinel continues to mark what was clearly an important Neolithic burial site, one that commanded the same spectacular views across Lough Swilly thousands of years ago as it does today.