The standing stone at Ballyvaloon in County Cork belongs to this category: it has been removed, leaving no visible trace on the ground. Whatever prehistoric or early historic purpose it once served, whether as a boundary marker, a ritual focus, or something else entirely, it is gone, and the south-south-west-facing slope where it once stood now holds no clue to its presence.

What makes its history faintly puzzling is the pattern of its appearances and disappearances in the cartographic record. The Ordnance Survey mapped Ireland in extraordinary detail during the 1840s, yet the Ballyvaloon stone does not appear on the 1842 six-inch map. It is absent again from the 1904 revision. Then, on the 1938 six-inch map, it is there, marked plainly as a single standing stone in an area of tillage. This sequence raises more questions than it answers. Was the stone simply missed by earlier surveyors, or was it re-erected, or perhaps only then brought to the attention of those responsible for marking such things? Standing stones, which are exactly what they sound like, single upright stones set into the ground, are among the most enduring and the most vulnerable of prehistoric monuments, easily overlooked in cultivated land and equally easily displaced by agricultural work. At Ballyvaloon, at some point after 1938, displacement appears to have been final.