A limestone pillar that once stood in open pasture near the north-eastern tip of Lough Gur in County Limerick appears, by all current evidence, to have sunk below ground level entirely. It does not appear on Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps, was absent from aerial orthoimages taken between 2005 and 2013, and yet something is clearly there when later satellite imagery is examined. It is the kind of site that rewards attention precisely because it resists easy classification, a stone that hovers between presence and absence depending on which year's photograph you consult.

When the archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly recorded the stone in 1944, he described it as a well-weathered limestone pillar standing roughly 0.99 metres high with a base width of around 0.56 metres. He noted it as an addition to a group of standing stones that had been documented earlier by Windle in 1912. The area around Lough Gur is extraordinarily dense with prehistoric and early medieval remains, and this stone sits within a cluster of related monuments. Two further standing stones, both known locally by the name Leagaun, lie 75 metres to the south-east and 260 metres to the north respectively. Some 340 metres to the west-south-west lies the Early Medieval settlement known as the Spectacles, a site whose name refers to the distinctive shape of its enclosures as seen from above. The archaeologist Eoin Grogan, in his 1989 doctoral thesis, catalogued this particular stone under the designation Lough Gur 7, a label that captures something of how methodically this landscape has been surveyed over the decades, even when individual monuments prove elusive.

Access to this part of the Lough Gur landscape is through agricultural land, and the stone itself sits in the centre of a large field. Given that it no longer appears to survive above ground level, a visitor should not expect a visible upright pillar. Google Earth imagery from June 2018 and September 2020 does show the location, so cross-referencing those images before visiting would help in orientating towards the right spot. The wider Lough Gur area, with the lake lying some 350 metres to the south-west, offers considerable context for anyone wanting to understand how densely layered this particular corner of County Limerick actually is.