The standing stone at Cloghfune, on a north-east-facing slope above Ballydonegan Bay in west Cork, belongs firmly in that company. When archaeologists visited in May 1992, they found a stone measuring roughly 1.1 metres wide and 1.5 metres tall, orientated along a north-east to south-west axis, sitting in rough pasture. Sometime after that visit, the stone was removed. So was a field boundary. So were some surface stones nearby. The slope remains; the bay still stretches out below it; the monument does not.

Standing stones are among the most common and least understood prehistoric features in the Irish landscape. They were erected, usually in the Bronze Age, for purposes that remain genuinely uncertain, ranging from territory markers to ritual focal points to components of astronomical alignments. The orientation of the Cloghfune example along a north-east to south-west axis is not unusual in itself, though such alignments are often noted in the context of solar or lunar observation. What makes this particular stone notable now is precisely its absence. It was there long enough to be measured and recorded, and then it was gone, cleared away along with the boundary stones around it, almost certainly during routine agricultural or land improvement work. The loss is undramatic but cumulative: across Ireland, many hundreds of prehistoric monuments have disappeared in exactly this way, not through neglect or vandalism but simply through the ordinary business of managing land.