A standing stone at Ceann Droma in County Cork, a single upright stone of the kind erected across Ireland from the Bronze Age onward as a marker, a boundary, or something whose original purpose we can no longer recover, survived long enough to be recorded and then was quietly removed. It is no longer there.

What the maps reveal is a small but telling story of absence. The stone does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1842 or 1904, which might mean it had already been overlooked by surveyors, was obscured by vegetation, or lay in a part of the landscape that received less attention. By 1940, however, it had been noted and marked on the revised six-inch map as a single standing stone, positioned in pasture on the southern side of the Sullane River, set high above the river level. That elevated position is characteristic of many such stones, which were often placed on ground that commanded a view or could itself be seen from a distance. At some point after that 1940 recording, the stone was removed during land reclamation works, the kind of agricultural improvement that reshaped so much of the Irish countryside in the mid to late twentieth century and claimed a quiet but significant number of prehistoric monuments in the process.