The standing stone at Ballygibbon in County Cork belongs to that category. It has left no visible surface trace, and the ground where it once stood gives nothing away.

What the maps tell us is a story of brief documentation and quiet disappearance. The stone does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1842 or 1904, which is itself curious, since standing stones, large upright slabs of rock erected during prehistory and used across millennia as markers, boundaries, or ceremonial focal points, were generally noted by OS surveyors when they were visible. By 1937, however, it had been recorded, appearing on the six-inch map of that year as a single standing stone. At some point after that survey, it was removed entirely. Whether it was cleared during agricultural improvement, incorporated into a field boundary, or simply disposed of, the record does not say. The 1937 map entry is, in effect, both its first and last official acknowledgement.

What remains is a gap in the landscape and a line in an inventory. Ballygibbon holds nothing for a visitor to see, which makes it an odd kind of place to write about. But the absence itself is worth noting. Standing stones survive across Cork in considerable numbers, silent and largely unexplained, and the fact that this one did not survive, that it slipped out of the record between one generation of mapping and the next, is a reminder of how contingent that survival tends to be.