At Ballinaclogh in County Cork, a standing stone is recorded on an east-facing pastoral slope, and yet there is nothing there to see. No stone breaks the surface, no stump of weathered rock protrudes from the grass. The site exists, in any meaningful sense, only on paper.

The paper in question is the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, which marks a stone at this precise location. Standing stones are among the most enigmatic of Irish prehistoric monuments, raised as solitary uprights across the landscape for purposes that remain debated, variously interpreted as boundary markers, ritual focal points, or astronomical indicators. Whatever this particular stone once signified, by the time the site was assessed for the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, no visible surface trace remained. It may have been removed, buried by soil accumulation over the intervening century and a half, or simply toppled and swallowed by the pasture. The 1842 map, then, serves as the sole surviving witness to its existence.