At Knocknalyre in County Cork, a solitary upright stone once marked the landscape in the way these monuments have done across Ireland for millennia, placed by people whose precise intentions remain unclear, whether as territorial markers, ritual focal points, or something else entirely. It is gone now, leaving only a documentary trace.

What little is known comes from a record made by Condon in 1916, who noted a greyish stone standing roughly four feet tall and measuring fifteen inches by thirteen inches at its face. That description is spare but telling: a modest stone, not the towering variety that draws visitors to more celebrated sites, but the kind that would have sat quietly in a field, easily overlooked and, as it turned out, easily removed. Its absence from both the 1842 and 1904 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps is curious. Those surveys were generally thorough in recording prehistoric monuments, so the stone may already have been gone by the earlier date, or it may simply have escaped the surveyors' notice before Condon caught it in the early twentieth century. Either way, by the time anyone thought to look carefully, it had already been taken away.