On a south-south-east-facing slope at Glanminnane in County Cork, a pasture field holds the memory of a standing stone that no longer exists. There is no visible surface trace. The ground offers no clue.

The stone itself was modest by the standards of prehistoric monuments. Bowman, writing in 1934, recorded its dimensions as roughly three feet tall, two feet three inches wide, and five inches thick, a relatively slender upright on land belonging at the time to a M. O'Keeffe. Sometime during the 1950s it was removed, the circumstances unrecorded. What makes the loss more pointed is the company it kept. The same field contains the site of an early church and burial ground, suggesting this corner of north Cork was a place of significance across a very long span of human activity. Standing stones are prehistoric in origin, their precise purposes debated, but their frequent proximity to early ecclesiastical sites hints at a continuity of meaning in certain landscapes, as if later communities recognised and resettled places that already carried some weight.