In the townland of Clydagh, in the south Kerry uplands drained by tributaries of the Gaddagh river, a standing stone once rose to over six feet in height. Locally it was called a gallaun, the Irish term for a single upright megalith, the kind of solitary prehistoric marker that punctuates the Kerry landscape in considerable numbers. This one, however, left no trace behind. It never appeared on Ordnance Survey maps, and sometime around the mid-1960s, during a period of extensive land reclamation in the area, it vanished entirely. The ground where it stood is now ordinary pasture.

The loss was quiet and undocumented in any formal sense. Reclamation schemes in mid-twentieth-century Ireland reshaped enormous areas of marginal upland, draining boggy ground to bring it into agricultural use. In the process, prehistoric monuments that had survived for millennia, and that had never been officially mapped or recorded, were simply absorbed into the improved land. The Clydagh gallaun was among them. Its dimensions, over six feet tall, suggest it was a substantial presence in the landscape, the sort of stone that would have been a local landmark for generations. The fact that it held a vernacular name at all points to a living folk memory around it, even if that memory could not protect it.