That is precisely what makes it worth knowing about. Where a group of four standing stones once occupied a north-east-facing slope in County Cork, there is now only pasture, no visible surface trace of anything that was once considered significant enough to be mapped, argued over, and written about across more than a century of Irish antiquarian scholarship.

The stones appear on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, positioned just east of the north-east corner of a rectangular enclosure. They were noted by the Cork antiquarian John Windele, who described four stones, two of which he believed bore ogham inscriptions. Ogham is an early medieval Irish script in which letters are represented by a series of notches and strokes cut along a central stem line, most often along the edge of a standing stone. Windele's account, cited by the scholar R.A.S. Macalister, suggests the inscribed stones stood within the rectangular enclosure itself, and that they were destroyed sometime in the mid-nineteenth century. Whether the stones Windele described are the same four shown on the 1842 map, positioned just outside the enclosure rather than inside it, has never been resolved with certainty. Macalister, writing in 1945, further complicated matters by claiming one of the stones was an ogham stone, a claim later researchers considered probably mistaken. DeValera and O Nualláin, surveying the site in 1982, found nothing remaining.

What the site leaves behind is essentially a paper trail of disagreement: conflicting descriptions, uncertain identifications, and a monument that was gone before anyone could settle the argument. The stones at Ballynabortagh are a small, quiet illustration of how much was lost in the agricultural improvements and clearances of the nineteenth century, often before the tools to record such things properly were even fully developed.