In the townland of Claragh Beg in County Cork, the site where at least one prehistoric standing stone once rose from the ground is now occupied by a disused quarry, the stone itself removed, its precise original position lost beneath the workings.

A 1937 record by Broker noted two stones in this townland. One stood five or six feet high, a modest but solid presence in the landscape. A second lay roughly two hundred yards away in the next field, and by the time of that same record it had already been destroyed. Standing stones are among the most enduring yet most vulnerable monuments in the Irish countryside; typically erected during the Bronze Age, they served purposes that remain debated, from boundary markers to ritual focal points. In Claragh Beg, neither stone survived into the present era intact. The first was eventually removed when quarrying began, and the exact location of the second has never been firmly established.

What remains at Claragh Beg is essentially an absence, a place where something ancient once stood and where the ground itself has since been fundamentally altered. The quarry that replaced the site is disused, which gives the landscape a doubly abandoned quality, cleared of its prehistoric monument and then cleared again of its industrial successor.