The standing stone at Ballygrady in north Cork managed the latter, absent from both the 1842 and 1905 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps despite sitting in plain sight on a hilltop in tillage ground. That omission is quietly puzzling. Surveyors working those editions were generally thorough about prehistoric monuments, and yet this one slipped past them on at least two occasions.

The stone itself is moderately substantial, standing 1.48 metres high with a base measuring roughly 1.5 metres by 0.7 metres, and subrectangular in plan, meaning it has something close to a rectangular cross-section rather than the irregular, unworked profile of a casual field boulder. Its long axis runs northeast to southwest, an orientation that recurs across many Irish standing stones and has prompted long debate about astronomical alignment, though no specific claim of that kind is made for this example. What gives it additional interest is its position beside a townland boundary. Standing stones across Ireland frequently sit at or near such boundaries, and it is often difficult to know whether the stone influenced where the boundary was drawn, or whether a convenient prehistoric marker was simply pressed into later administrative use. In either case, the association hints at a long afterlife for a monument whose original purpose remains, as with most Irish standing stones, genuinely unknown.