This one in Garranes, County Cork, announces itself with nothing at all. A north-facing pasture slope, a field of grass, and no visible surface trace of anything that might once have stood there. The site is recorded as a standing stone, the kind of tall, upright megalith that punctuates the Irish countryside in various states of survival, yet here there is simply absence.

Local tradition holds that three stones were removed from the site around 1973. That detail, modest as it is, carries some weight. It shifts the story from one of gradual natural loss, the slow subsidence and burial that takes many standing stones out of the visible record over centuries, to something more abrupt and more recent. Within living memory, it seems, the stones were here and then they were not. Whether they were shifted for agricultural convenience, repurposed as building material, or simply moved elsewhere on the land, the tradition does not say. What remains is a classified archaeological site with nothing left to classify by eye, a coordinate on a map pointing at an ordinary-looking field in Cork.