At Eyon in County Limerick, a cluster of large boulders was observed in 1995, recorded with careful uncertainty, and then buried, leaving behind a question that can no longer be answered on the ground.

The boulders came to light when archaeologist Celie O Rahilly was preparing an Environmental Impact Statement for a planned quarry extension in the area. She noted the presence of several large erratic boulders on the surface, an erratic being a boulder transported and deposited by glacial movement rather than formed in place, which makes the distinction between a natural scatter and a deliberate prehistoric arrangement genuinely difficult to establish. O Rahilly was candid about the limits of what she could determine: the boulders were separated from her by a boundary, and she could not examine them closely. Her written assessment gave two possibilities, that they were a natural formation, or that they formed an alignment of archaeological significance, meaning a deliberate row or grouping of standing or placed stones associated with prehistoric ritual use. By the time she returned to the subject in a further report in 1999, the question had become moot. The area had been backfilled, and the feature was no longer accessible. Subsequent land clearance removed any remaining surface trace. The site was compiled into the record by Denis Power and uploaded in October 2013, where it now sits as a placeholder for something that may or may not have been there.

There is nothing to see at Eyon today, and that is precisely what makes the record worth knowing about. The landscape has been substantially altered by quarrying and clearance, and no surface evidence of the boulders described by O Rahilly remains. The site exists only in an EIS footnote and a database entry, a provisional observation that was hedged at the time and rendered permanently unresolvable shortly afterwards. It is a reminder that the archaeological record of any region is shaped as much by the timing of surveys and the pace of development as by what the ground actually contains.