A standing stone once occupied a spot in the townland of Loughane in mid-Cork, but it has since been removed entirely, and today there is no visible trace of it at the surface. What makes it particularly curious is the narrow window in which it can even be confirmed to have existed: the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1842 and 1904 make no mention of it, yet by 1937 it had been recorded on a revised edition of the same mapping series as a single standing stone. Somewhere in those intervening decades it was noticed, documented, and then lost.

Standing stones are among the most enigmatic monuments in the Irish landscape. They are generally associated with the Bronze Age, though many defy easy dating, and their original purposes remain debated, ranging from boundary markers and memorial stones to components of ritual landscapes. The Loughane example fits a wider pattern across Cork, where such stones are scattered through townlands in varying states of survival. What distinguishes this one is that its disappearance appears to have been deliberate rather than gradual. It was not buried by peat or obscured by scrub; it was removed. Whether that happened in the course of agricultural clearance, road-making, or simple convenience, the record does not say.