It is, in the most literal sense, a site of absence. The stone was removed around 1981, leaving no visible surface trace, and the field it once occupied has closed over as though nothing of consequence ever stood there.

What makes the loss particularly interesting is the context in which the stone existed. By the time the 1940 Ordnance Survey six-inch map was drawn, the stone was recorded as sitting in a field just to the north of what surveyors believed to be a stone circle, with a pair of standing stones also noted nearby. Standing stones, which are single upright prehistoric megaliths erected most commonly during the Bronze Age, are frequently found in such clusters across Cork and Kerry, their arrangement suggesting deliberate ceremonial or territorial patterning in the landscape. The Gortavranner stone had apparently escaped the attention of the 1842 and 1903 OS mapmakers entirely, which raises the question of whether it was simply overlooked in those earlier surveys or whether its significance as a monument had not yet been formally recognised. It did not survive long after it finally made it onto the record. Within roughly four decades of being mapped, it was gone.

There is nothing to see at Gortavranner now, and that itself is a kind of historical fact worth sitting with. The nearby stone circle and the pair of standing stones may still warrant attention for those interested in the broader prehistoric landscape of mid-Cork, but the single stone is simply absent, a small and unremarkable erasure from a countryside that has lost many such things without ceremony or notice.