That, in its own way, is what makes the place worth knowing about. Ordnance Survey maps from the third edition record three standing stones at this location, upright and apparently intact when the surveyors passed through. By around 1973, according to local memory, all three had been removed. What had stood for an unknown number of centuries was gone within living memory, leaving no visible surface trace.

Standing stones are among the most common and least understood monuments in the Irish landscape. Erected singly or in small groups, often during the Bronze Age though sometimes later, they served purposes that remain genuinely unclear: boundary markers, memorial stones, astronomical indicators, or something else entirely. A group of three, set in marshy ground, would have been a reasonably distinctive arrangement. The marsh setting is itself of some interest, since waterlogged or low-lying ground was frequently treated as liminal or significant in prehistoric and early historic Ireland. Whether the Ardrah stones were placed deliberately in that wet landscape, or whether the ground shifted around them over the centuries, is now impossible to say. What the OS third edition map captured was already, in a sense, a survivor's record.