At Cappaboy Beg in County Cork, a standing stone is recorded just outside the south-eastern side of a cashel, the term for a dry-stone ringfort of the early medieval period, typically enclosing a farmstead or high-status dwelling. The stone itself, however, has left no visible surface trace. It exists, at this point, almost entirely as a category, a placeholder in the archaeological record for something that once stood upright in the West Cork landscape and has since vanished into the ground, or been removed, or simply subsided beyond recognition.