That is precisely what makes this spot worth knowing about. A standing stone once rose here, the kind of upright prehistoric monolith the Irish traditionally called a gallaun, and it has since been removed so completely that no trace of it remains at ground level. The absence itself becomes the point.

What little the cartographic record tells us is quietly interesting. The stone does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, which was a remarkably thorough survey of the Irish landscape and generally captured even minor antiquities. Yet by the time the revised six-inch map was produced in 1904, the stone had been recorded and labelled, marked with the Irish term "Gallaun" in the tradition surveyors used to distinguish these prehistoric upright stones from later boundary markers or gateposts. Whether the stone was simply missed in 1842, or whether the labelling conventions changed between surveys, the gap of six decades between the two maps leaves its own small puzzle. At some point after 1904, the stone was taken away entirely, leaving the pasture undisturbed and the slope anonymous.