At Glenaglogh in County Cork, a standing stone, the kind of upright megalith erected across Ireland during prehistory, most likely during the Bronze Age, once occupied a patch of reclaimed pasture on the northern side of a stream. It is gone now, leaving no visible surface trace. The ground holds nothing to mark where it stood.

What makes the site quietly odd is how it flickers in and out of the historical record. The Ordnance Survey mapped this part of Cork in 1842 and again in 1904, and neither survey noted any stone. Then the 1938 six-inch map marks it plainly as a single standing stone. Whether the stone was present all along and simply missed by earlier surveyors, or whether it was recorded in 1938 precisely because its removal was already imminent or recent, is not clear. The reclaimed pasture setting offers one likely explanation for its disappearance; land improvement schemes across rural Ireland cleared countless ancient stones that were inconvenient to farmers working newly drained ground, and a solitary standing stone beside a stream in mid Cork would have presented an obvious obstacle to the plough.