The one at Monalahy in County Cork was absent from both the 1842 and 1904 six-inch OS maps, which means it slipped past the surveyors who were otherwise meticulous in recording prehistoric monuments across the Irish landscape. It stands in pasture on a west-facing slope, roughly rectangular in plan, with its long axis oriented northeast to southwest. At 1.45 metres tall and measuring 0.72 by 0.54 metres at its base, it is a modest but solid presence, the kind of stone that could easily be mistaken for a field boundary marker by anyone who did not know to look twice.

Standing stones like this one are among the most enigmatic features of the Irish countryside. They date most commonly from the Bronze Age, though precise dating is rarely possible without excavation, and their original purpose remains genuinely uncertain. Some are thought to mark boundaries, territorial or ceremonial; others may have served as waypoints, memorials, or components of now-vanished ritual landscapes. The northeast-southwest orientation at Monalahy is worth noting, as many Irish standing stones align with solar or lunar events on the horizon, though whether that holds here is unrecorded. What the Monalahy stone does share with countless others is its quiet persistence, standing in a field while the maps that were supposed to document it twice failed to notice it was there.