No stone breaks the grass, no shadow falls at an odd angle in the morning light. Whatever once stood here is gone, and the ground gives no indication it was ever otherwise.

What did stand here, at least as late as 1916, was a modest standing stone, those solitary upright stones erected across Ireland during the Bronze Age, their precise purposes still debated, whether ritual, territorial, or funerary in function. The record left by a researcher named Condon in that year describes it with the kind of plain precision that makes its subsequent disappearance feel all the more final: three feet six inches tall, a foot and a half wide, only a few inches thick, and of a greyish colour. It was, by the standards of prehistoric monuments, an unassuming object. Removed at some point after that documentation, it left no visible surface trace behind.