At Drombeg in County Cork, a standing stone was reported at a location on a north-north-west-facing slope in pasture land, only for a follow-up inspection to find nothing at all. No stone, no socket hole, no clear trace of removal. The site exists, in a formal sense, as an absence.

The details are sparse but suggestive. Local information was the original source for the stone's existence, which is not unusual; oral knowledge of landscape features often preserves memory of things that predate any written inventory. Standing stones in Ireland vary enormously in age and purpose, ranging from Bronze Age boundary or ritual markers to early medieval grave indicators, and without the stone itself there is no way to date or classify what stood here. The Archaeological Inventory of County Cork recorded the site in its fifth volume, published in 2009, with the candid conclusion that the stone could not be located. Whether it was taken for use as a gatepost or field boundary, buried, or simply misremembered in its precise location, the record does not say.

Drombeg is better known for its stone circle a short distance away, one of the more closely studied prehistoric monuments in Munster, which may be part of why this smaller, now-absent feature attracted enough attention to be noted and then investigated. The pasture slope holds no visible marker of what may once have stood there.