At Farranalough in County Cork, a field on a south-facing slope holds a prehistoric upright stone, or at least it used to, visibly. Today there is no surface trace whatsoever, meaning that whatever raised itself out of this pasture at some point disappeared entirely from view, swallowed by soil accumulation, agricultural activity, or simple toppling and burial over the centuries.

The stone was recorded in 1933 by Seán P. Ó Ríordáin, one of the most significant Irish archaeologists of the twentieth century, who noted it as standing nine feet seven inches high and five feet broad at the base, leaning at a considerable angle of forty-five degrees. Standing stones, large single upright slabs erected during the prehistoric period, are common across Cork and Kerry, though their original purposes remain debated; they have been associated with burial, boundary-marking, and ritual landscape use. The one at Farranalough would have been a substantial example, that lean giving it a quality less of authority than of something mid-gesture, caught in the act of either falling or deliberately placed at that dramatic angle. Whether it was already inclining when Ó Ríordáin measured it, or had been pushed or settled into that position over millennia, the notes do not say. What they do confirm is that within living memory the stone existed in recognisable form, and that now it does not.