There is something quietly paradoxical about a standing stone that is no longer standing, and may no longer exist at all. In open pasture near Kilmacredock in County Kildare, roughly ninety metres south-east of a ringfort, a limestone boulder was recorded in 1972, lying flat in the field and measuring about 1.3 metres long and half a metre thick. By 1985, even that much was gone; no visible trace remained. Whether it was shifted, buried, or simply absorbed into the workings of a working farm is unknown.

What makes the absence stranger is the place-name. The nearby townland of Carton carries a name that Fitzgerald, writing in the early 1900s, traced to the Irish "Baile an Cairthe", meaning the town of the pillar stone. Standing stones, sometimes called galláin in Irish, were typically erected in prehistory as territorial markers, burial indicators, or ceremonial focal points, and they have a way of giving their names to the land around them long after the stone itself is gone or forgotten. In this case, the name apparently outlasted not only the upright stone but also its fallen remnant. The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the standard baseline for recording field monuments in Ireland, contains no mention of it at all, which suggests the stone had already lost its prominence, or its identity, well before Victorian cartographers arrived to document the landscape.

What remains is a kind of ghost monument: a feature that passed through recorded history briefly, in a single mid-twentieth-century description, only to vanish again, leaving the townland name as its most durable trace.