This one in Ballinwear, County Tipperary, is remarkable for what it no longer does. On a south-east-facing slope of gently rolling pastureland, there is no stone to see, no earthwork, no hollow in the ground. The site survives in the record precisely because it was once considered worth recording, and then, at some point between one survey and the next, whatever stood here simply vanished.

Standing stones are among the most durable and least understood monuments in the Irish landscape, single upright stones raised during prehistory whose original purposes, whether markers, memorials, or ritual points in a wider landscape, remain largely a matter of debate. The stone at Ballinwear appeared on the first-edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1843, clearly enough to be plotted and noted. When the second edition was produced in 1903, it was gone. Sixty years, roughly, is the window in which someone decided the stone was more useful cleared than left standing. The western field boundary that appeared on the earlier maps has also since been removed, erasing even the landscape framework that once helped locate the stone precisely. What had been a fixed point in a documented field system is now unmarked pasture.