At Raheennamadra in County Limerick, a standing stone, or what was once a standing stone, has effectively disappeared into the ground. No surface remains were visible on aerial orthoimages taken between 2011 and 2013, nor on subsequent Google Earth imagery, and the site does not appear on any of the Ordnance Survey Ireland historic map series. What is recorded here is, in a sense, an absence.

The clearest account of what once stood at Raheennamadra comes from the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, whose survey notes from 1917 to 1919 describe a companion to a nearby standing stone. Westropp noted that this second stone was possibly as large as the first, but partly buried, and that it lay to the north-east, above a slope descending to a stream that joined a second stream, with several pools and springs alongside. Standing stones are among the most widespread prehistoric monument types in Ireland, raised during the Bronze Age or earlier for purposes that remain genuinely unclear, though associations with boundaries, burials, and ritual gathering are all recorded elsewhere. The landscape around this one retains traces of longer occupation: a cluster of ringforts, the circular earthwork enclosures typical of early medieval Irish settlement, lies roughly 140 metres to the south-east. Aerial photographs taken by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland in October 2002 and January 2003 are held on record, though these have not confirmed any visible surface trace of the stone itself.

The site sits in pasture, which means access is a matter of farmland rather than public path. The stream confluence and associated springs that Westropp described are the most useful locating features in the landscape, since the stone, if it survives at all, is likely to be below ground level somewhere above that slope. There is nothing to see in the conventional sense, and that is rather the point. What this record preserves is the memory of something noted once, by one observer, and not confirmed since. For anyone interested in the archaeology of absence, or in how much of the prehistoric landscape has simply been absorbed back into the earth, Raheennamadra offers a quietly instructive example.