The standing stone at Garraun in County Cork belongs firmly to the second category. It is marked on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1937, a lone upright stone on a south-west-facing slope of pasture, but by the time anyone thought to record it in detail, it was already gone. No visible trace remains on the surface today.

What makes the Garraun stone particularly elusive is the gap in the cartographic record. The 1842 and 1904 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which together document enormous swathes of the Irish landscape in considerable detail, make no mention of it at all. It appears only in the 1937 edition, situated in a field roughly 75 metres to the north-east of a second possible standing stone nearby. Standing stones are among the more enduring monuments in the Irish countryside, typically large enough and heavy enough to resist casual removal, yet this one vanished between its first cartographic acknowledgement and any formal archaeological investigation. Whether it was taken for use as a gatepost, a field boundary marker, or simply cleared as an inconvenience during agricultural work is unrecorded.

The proximity of a second possible standing stone in the same area adds a layer of interest. Pairs or loose groupings of standing stones are not unusual in Mid Cork, and the relationship between the two sites at Garraun, if there ever was one, is now impossible to assess. What survives is a map reference, a grid location on a sloped field, and the quietly unsettling fact that something which stood for perhaps thousands of years disappeared without record within living memory of its rediscovery.