These upright stones, set into the ground by human hands during prehistory, are scattered throughout Ireland in their thousands, and yet each loss is irreversible. The one at Ceann Droma left no dramatic record of its going, only a gap in the landscape where something old and deliberate had once been placed.

What the cartographic record reveals is a modest but telling sequence. The stone does not appear on the six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1842, which is curious given how thoroughly that survey documented the Irish countryside. By 1938, however, a revised six-inch map marks it clearly as a single standing stone set in pasture on a southward slope. The gap between those two surveys leaves open the question of whether the stone was simply overlooked in the nineteenth century, or whether it had been re-erected or newly noticed in the intervening decades. Within less than a decade of its 1938 appearance on the map, it was gone.