This one is remarkable for what does not. At Gortnascreeny in County Cork, a standing stone once occupied a north-facing slope of pastureland, the kind of solitary upright megalith that punctuates the West Cork countryside with quiet regularity. Standing stones were erected across Ireland during the Bronze Age and into the early medieval period, their precise purposes debated but likely ranging from boundary markers to ritual or commemorative monuments. At Gortnascreeny, there is nothing left to see. The stone is gone, removed by the landowner, and the ground offers no visible surface trace of where it once stood.

The loss is undramatic but worth pausing over. West Cork has a particularly dense concentration of prehistoric monuments, and standing stones form a significant part of that record. Each removal quietly diminishes a landscape that was, at some point in the distant past, deliberately shaped by the people who lived in it. The stone at Gortnascreeny was recorded before its disappearance, which is how it remains known at all, but the record now describes an absence rather than a presence.