Somewhere in the landscape around Windgap, County Waterford, there is an ogham stone that nobody has seen for the better part of two centuries, and whose inscription was never recorded. What makes its absence particularly pointed is that we know exactly how it disappeared: sometime around 1845, the stone was pulled from its position and trimmed down to serve as an agricultural roller for breaking earth-clods. An ancient piece of writing, carved in ogham, the early medieval script in which letters are represented by a series of notches and strokes cut along a central line, was quietly repurposed into a farming implement. Whatever name or formula had been cut into it is gone.

Before that moment of practical destruction, the stone had already had a long secondary life. It had been used, along with a companion ogham stone, as a lintel inside a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with early Irish ringforts and used for storage or refuge. That souterrain sat within a rath, the circular earthwork enclosure that was a common form of early medieval settlement across Ireland. The scholar R. A. S. Macalister, who catalogued ogham stones exhaustively in both 1909 and 1945, noted the stone's presence at the site and its fate, placing its removal at around 1845. His is the only real record of it, and even he was working from what had already been lost: the inscription itself was never read or transcribed before the stone was altered. It is now unlocated.