On the lower south-western slopes of Mauherslieve in County Tipperary, there once stood a megalithic structure, a prehistoric arrangement of large upright stones, that had completely vanished by 1904. No photograph was taken, no sketch survives, and no stones remain in place. What we are left with is a brief note from around 1840, recorded in an Ordnance Survey Name Book, describing it as consisting of "a few large stones placed erect on a hill." That spare phrase is the entire physical record of something that had likely stood for several thousand years.

The description, laconic as it is, fits the broader category of standing stone settings or megalithic monuments that dotted the Irish landscape during the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods. These structures, whether single standing stones or small grouped arrangements, were erected for purposes that remain debated, possibly ceremonial, possibly territorial, possibly astronomical. Whatever its original function, the Baurnadomeeny example was gone within living memory of its first formal documentation. The scholars Ruaidhri De Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, who catalogued megalithic monuments across Ireland during the twentieth century, included it in their survey, though by that point they were already recording an absence rather than a presence.