This one is remarkable for what does not. On a north-facing slope in Lackenduff, in the west of County Cork, there is a field in pasture where a standing stone once rose from the ground. It no longer does. Around 1982, the stone was removed, and today there is no visible surface trace of it whatsoever, not even a socket hollow or a disturbed patch of earth that might hint at what once stood there.

Standing stones are among the most enigmatic monuments in the Irish landscape, single upright slabs erected during the Bronze Age or earlier, whose precise purposes remain debated. Some marked boundaries, some may have had ritual or astronomical significance, and others perhaps served as waymarkers or memorials. Whatever this particular stone meant to the people who raised it, it endured in the Lackenduff pasture long enough to be recorded, only to disappear within living memory. The date of its removal, around 1982, places its loss firmly in the recent past, well within the span of a single generation.