This one is notable for what it may or may not be. Somewhere on a north-west-facing slope in Ballyoughtera, County Cork, overlooking a quiet valley, there is, or was, or perhaps never quite was, a standing stone. Modest by any measure, the stone recorded in 1996 measured roughly 0.6 to 0.7 metres across and stood about a metre tall, irregular in shape, set into pasture ground. The qualifier "possible" attached to it is doing considerable work.

When surveyors returned to inspect the location, they could not find it. This is not as unusual as it might sound. Standing stones, which are single upright stones erected in prehistory for purposes that remain largely speculative, ranging from territorial markers to ritual focal points, can be displaced by farming activity, buried under shifting soil, or simply obscured by dense vegetation. A stone only a metre high in the middle of a working pasture is not difficult to lose. What was recorded in 1996 and published in the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, Volume 5 in 2009 is essentially a sighting, a note that something was there, combined with an honest admission that it could not later be confirmed. The inventory entry captures a particular kind of archaeological uncertainty: the monument that hovers between existence and absence, logged but unverified.