It is recorded, catalogued, assigned a townland, and yet it leaves no visible surface trace. The grass grows over it, or around it, or perhaps simply without it, and the question of whether the stone still exists below ground, was removed at some point, or was always more rumour than monument is one the landscape declines to answer.

Standing stones, the solitary upright slabs erected across Ireland from the Bronze Age onwards, tend to survive precisely because they are hard to ignore. They interrupt fields, catch the eye from roads, accumulate folklore. The one recorded at Letterlicky Middle is notable for doing none of these things. Its entry in the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork places it in the valley of the Durrus River, in pasture, and notes the absence of anything to see. That combination, a site with a grid reference and a category but no physical presence, sits in a quiet category of its own. It may have been toppled and buried by agricultural work at some point over the centuries, or the original record may have been based on fragmentary evidence to begin with. Either way, the Durrus valley has closed over it.