At Ballykerwick in County Cork, a standing stone once occupied a south-facing pastoral slope, the kind of quietly commanding position that prehistoricommunities across Ireland seem to have favoured for these solitary upright stones. Standing stones are among the most enigmatic monuments in the Irish landscape, typically dating to the Bronze Age, though their exact purpose, whether marking territory, burial sites, astronomical alignments, or routeways, remains a matter of debate. This one, however, is no longer there to prompt any such questions.

When the archaeologist P. J. Hartnett visited in 1939 and recorded the stone, it measured 38 inches tall, 19 inches wide, and 8 inches thick, a modest but solid slab, the kind easily overlooked in a field but unmistakably deliberate in its placement. Hartnett noted its location and dimensions, and that record passed into the published corpus of Cork's archaeology. At some point after that visit, the stone was removed. No visible surface trace remains. The pasture has closed over whatever socket or packing stones might once have anchored it in the ground, and the slope carries on without it.