The court tomb at Seanachaidh in County Mayo offers none of that. When inspectors visited the site in 1995, they found it had been completely quarried away, leaving not even a trace of the structure that had once stood there. Court tombs are among Ireland's oldest megalithic monuments, Neolithic stone structures typically featuring an open semicircular forecourt leading into a roofed burial gallery, built by farming communities several thousand years before the Christian era. At Seanachaidh, whatever configuration of uprights and capstones once existed has been entirely consumed by the quarrying process, making this, in a quiet and unremarkable way, a monument to absence.

The tomb was recorded by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin in their Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, Volume II, covering County Mayo, published in Dublin in 1964. That survey documented court tombs across the county at a time when many such sites were already under varying degrees of pressure from agriculture, construction, and stone extraction. The fact that the Seanachaidh tomb was sufficiently intact to be catalogued in 1964, yet entirely gone by 1995, gives some sense of how quickly a monument that survived millennia can disappear within a single generation.