In the townland of Ahadallane in mid-Cork, a standing stone, the kind of tall, upright prehistoric marker that punctuates the Irish countryside with quiet insistence, once occupied a patch of pasture. It is there on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1939, recorded plainly as a single standing stone. Then, at some point after that survey, it was removed. No visible trace of it remains at the surface.

What makes the cartographic record here particularly curious is the gap it reveals. The stone does not appear on the equivalent OS maps of 1842 or 1904, which suggests either that it was overlooked by earlier surveyors, that it was obscured by vegetation or ground conditions at the time, or that its identification as an antiquity came later. By 1939 someone had noted it and it made the map. Standing stones as a class of monument are among the most enigmatic in the Irish prehistoric record; their purposes are debated, with suggestions ranging from territorial markers to ceremonial focal points to elements of now-vanished ritual landscapes. Whatever this particular stone meant or marked, it stood long enough to be recorded and was then lost to agricultural clearance or some other practical intervention that left the field unmarked and unremarkable.