Not collapsed into a ditch, not repurposed as a gatepost or lintel in the way so many prehistoric stones were quietly absorbed into the landscape, but simply gone, with no visible trace remaining at the surface and no memory of it preserved among the people who live nearby.

The stone was recorded in 1932 by the National Museum of Ireland. What makes it slightly unusual, even among standing stones, is the precision of the original description: it was square in section, with a breadth varying between eight and a quarter inches and nine inches along most of its length, and it leaned to the north. Standing stones are among the most common prehistoric monument types in Ireland, single upright slabs of stone erected during the Bronze Age or earlier, their original purposes debated but likely ranging from territorial markers to ritual or funerary functions. This one was methodical in its proportions, almost architectural in its regularity. Someone shaped it, or selected it carefully. By the time the twentieth century took an interest, it was already leaning. At some point after 1932, it disappeared from view entirely.

That detail, that it is not known locally, is perhaps the most quietly striking thing about it. Oral tradition in rural Ireland has preserved the locations of far more obscure monuments for generations. Here, the memory did not hold. Whatever the stone once meant to the people who raised it, and whatever it meant to later generations who passed it daily, that thread was cut long before anyone thought to ask.