At Garranenagappul in County Cork, a standing stone, the kind of upright prehistoric monolith that has punctuated the Irish landscape for thousands of years, was noted on a south-facing pasture slope, and then, at some point after 1940, it was gone. No visible surface trace remains.

What makes this particular absence interesting is the paper trail, or rather the lack of one until relatively recently. The stone does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1842 or 1903, which were remarkably thorough documents of the Irish countryside, recording field boundaries, ruins, and antiquities with considerable care. Yet by the time the 1940 Ordnance Survey revision came around, it was there, marked plainly as a single standing stone on a south-facing slope in pasture. Standing stones in Ireland are generally understood to date from the Bronze Age, though their precise purposes remain debated; they appear in isolation, in pairs, and in alignments, and were sometimes associated with burial or territorial markers. Whether this one had stood quietly unnoticed by earlier surveyors, or had been exposed or re-erected in the intervening decades, is not recorded. What is certain is that it was subsequently removed, leaving nothing behind on the ground.