The stone at Cloghboola More in County Cork was removed around 1984, leaving behind only the record of what had been there, and the faint question of why it was taken at all. What makes its absence stranger still is that it was never marked on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1842 or 1904, meaning it passed through two centuries of cartographic scrutiny without being noticed, only to disappear shortly after someone finally wrote it down properly.

A gallan is the Irish term for a standing stone, one of the most common and least understood monument types in the Irish landscape, usually prehistoric in origin and rarely explained by the archaeological record. The Cloghboola More example sat on a north-east-facing slope in pasture, and in 1937 a researcher named Broker recorded its dimensions as six feet high and five feet in girth, a reasonably substantial upright stone by any measure. It was part of a small cluster, with three other monuments recorded in close proximity, which is not unusual; standing stones in Ireland frequently appear near other features such as burial cairns, enclosures, or other uprights, suggesting they once formed part of a broader, organised landscape. Whether this particular grouping had any functional or ceremonial relationship between its parts is not known, but the density of monuments in a single area of Mid Cork countryside hints at a location that held some significance across a long period of time.