This one did not. What remains of the structure known as Carrowmore 53 is a scatter of fifteen gneiss boulders, nine of them lying displaced to the west of a field boundary and six more simply absorbed into that boundary itself, pressed into service as ordinary farm wall material. The monument was already gone by the time anyone thought to write it down properly.

When the antiquarian George Petrie visited in 1837, he found only fragments and recorded, with a certain weary familiarity, that the circle had been destroyed "a few years ago" and that, "as usual, it had a cromlech within it." That phrase, "as usual," speaks to how common this particular arrangement was at Carrowmore: a ring of large boulders enclosing a central cromlech, which is a simple megalithic chamber formed by upright stones capped with a large flat slab. The cemetery at Carrowmore, on the Coolera Peninsula in County Sligo, is one of the largest and oldest megalithic complexes in Ireland, and Petrie's note was eventually published in an 1868 edition of his collected writings edited by Margaret Stokes. By then, whatever had once stood at this spot had long since been broken up and redistributed into the landscape. The boulders themselves are gneiss, a coarse-grained metamorphic rock common in the region and a material used consistently by the people who built across this peninsula during the Neolithic period.