This one is remarkable for what does not. At Termons in County Kerry, on the Iveragh Peninsula, there was once a standing stone roughly five feet tall, its base steadied with packing stones in the manner common to many such monuments across Ireland. Sometime in 1990, when the field it occupied was cleared and ploughed, the stone was removed. It left behind no OS map reference, no official record of its precise location, and, as far as can be determined, no physical trace.

Standing stones are among the most enigmatic of Ireland's prehistoric monuments. Erected singly or in alignment, their original purposes remain largely unknown, with theories ranging from boundary markers to ritual or astronomical functions. Most were set with packing stones wedged around the base to keep them upright, exactly as described here, a detail that suggests this example was deliberately and carefully placed rather than incidentally present. What makes the Termons stone particularly melancholy is its invisibility even before its destruction. It never appeared on Ordnance Survey mapping, meaning its existence depended entirely on local knowledge passed down informally. Once the field was cleared, that thread snapped. The stone was recorded in A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan's 1996 archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, drawing on that local information, but by the time the survey was published the monument itself had already been gone for several years.