It is the kind of absence that is almost harder to reckon with than a ruin: no crumbling stump, no fragment to photograph, just a slope of grass with nothing to show for what was once there.

A gallan, the Irish term for a standing stone, once occupied a south-facing hillside here, positioned roughly fifty metres west of a nearby ringfort. A ringfort, for context, is a circular enclosure defined by earthen banks or stone walls, common across Ireland from the early medieval period, though the standing stone beside this one may well have predated it by millennia. When a researcher named Broker visited in 1937, the stone had already been brought down. The record he left is precise and almost elegiac: six feet in height, three or four feet in girth, thrown down and buried where it fell. Whether it was felled deliberately, for agricultural convenience or some other reason, is not recorded. What is clear is that by the mid-twentieth century the stone existed only as a buried object, its original purpose and the full span of its history effectively closed off.