This one is remarkable for what it was, and no longer is. A standing stone that once occupied a field in Curraleigh, County Cork, has been removed entirely, leaving no visible trace at the surface. What makes it quietly odd is not its disappearance, which happened to many such stones across Ireland as land was cleared and farmed, but the narrow documentary window through which we know it existed at all.

Ordnance Survey mapping tells the story in three snapshots. The stone does not appear on the six-inch OS maps of 1842 or 1903, which is unusual, since the nineteenth-century surveyors were generally attentive to upright stones in the landscape and recorded them with some consistency. Then, in the 1939 revision of the six-inch series, there it is, marked as a single standing stone. After that, nothing. At some point between that mid-twentieth-century survey and more recent fieldwork, the stone was taken down or buried, and the ground closed over it. Whether it had always been there and was simply missed by earlier cartographers, or whether its appearance on the 1939 map reflects some other change in the landscape, is now impossible to say with confidence. Standing stones in Ireland range in date from the Neolithic through to the early medieval period, and without the stone itself, any attempt to assign this one a date or purpose would be guesswork.