Somewhere in the valley of the Clodiagh River in County Waterford, there was once a standing stone. It stood on a broad, low plateau, measured just 1.25 metres in height, and was made of conglomerate, a sedimentary rock formed from compressed fragments of older stone. By 2012, when someone went to check on it, it was simply gone. No record of where it ended up, no explanation attached to its absence. The present location, as the record puts it with admirable bluntness, is unknown.

Before it disappeared, the stone had already sustained some damage. It was roughly oriented northwest to southeast and had an irregular cross-section varying between 0.2 and 0.4 metres wide and 0.7 metres across, which gives it the squat, uneven profile typical of many prehistoric standing stones in Munster. It sat approximately twelve metres west of an earthwork enclosure, that kind of proximity being fairly common with standing stones, which were often positioned in deliberate relation to other features in the landscape rather than placed in isolation. Whether the enclosure and the stone shared the same period of use is the sort of question that can rarely be answered with certainty even when the stone is present. With this one absent, it recedes further still into speculation.