At Dawstown in County Cork, a standing stone, the kind of upright prehistoric monument erected across Ireland over thousands of years, was still present in living memory, and then it was not. What remains now is the absence of a thing, documented but vanished, leaving the field as blank as if the stone had never been there.

The stone's history is traceable only in a narrow window of cartographic evidence. It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1842 or 1904, which is itself a curiosity. Either it was overlooked by the surveyors on those earlier occasions, or its rediscovery or recognition came later. By 1937, however, it had been marked on the revised six-inch OS map as a single standing stone. That gives it a confirmed existence at that point, somewhere in the decades between the two World Wars. Around 1967, it was removed. No visible surface trace remains today, which means there is nothing to find, no socket, no stump of stone, no earthwork to suggest where it once stood.