The standing stone at Carrigleigh in County Cork survives as none of these things. It is, by all available evidence, simply gone, leaving behind only its outline on a map made nearly two centuries ago and a flat patch of ground beside a driveway where something once stood upright.

Standing stones are among the most enigmatic of prehistoric monument types in Ireland, raised as boundary markers, memorials, or ritual focal points across several millennia, their original purposes often unrecoverable. The Carrigleigh example was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, a nationwide survey that captured the Irish landscape in extraordinary detail at a time when many such monuments were still intact. At that point, the stone stood on level ground alongside a driveway leading to a house, a position that may itself tell a small story. Stones in the vicinity of later farm buildings and estates were often vulnerable to clearance, either quarried for construction, rolled aside for convenience, or simply buried. Whatever happened at Carrigleigh, the stone had already disappeared by the time anyone came to look more carefully, and no surface trace remains.