In the townland of Burgesbeg in County Tipperary, a standing stone, the kind of upright prehistoric marker found across Ireland and erected anywhere from the Neolithic through to the early medieval period, has almost certainly been destroyed. What remains is an absence, and a reasonable guess at why it happened.

The stone is thought to have been lost when a townland boundary was removed. Townland boundaries in Ireland were often maintained by physical features, field walls, ditches, earthworks, and occasionally standing stones that had been absorbed into the landscape over centuries and put to administrative use long after their original purpose had been forgotten. When such boundaries were cleared, usually in the course of agricultural reorganisation or land consolidation, the markers that defined them sometimes went with them. In this case, the field where the stone stood lay along one such boundary, and the stone did not survive the clearance. No visible remains have been recorded on site.