At Tyfarnham in County Westmeath, a standing stone, the kind of upright prehistoric marker erected across Ireland thousands of years ago to mark boundaries, graves, or alignments now lost to us, was recorded as a site of archaeological interest. The difficulty is that by the time the record was formalised, the ground on which it once stood had already been consumed by a modern quarry.

The details are sparse, and deliberately so: no archive file was ever compiled for this particular site, leaving researchers with little more than a location and a qualification. That word "possible" carries weight. It suggests the stone may have been noted in an earlier source, an old map, a local account, a field observation, without ever being formally verified. Quarrying, which reshapes and removes the landscape at depth, is among the more final threats to any surface monument. Unlike a site damaged by ploughing or development, a stone swallowed by a working quarry leaves no practical prospect of recovery or future investigation.