This one is remarkable for what no longer can be found. At Mountirvine in County Sligo, there was, until the recent past, an upright stone believed to be a prehistoric standing stone, though by the time anyone thought to record it carefully, it had already been pressed into a second career as a gate pier. That detail alone tells a familiar Irish story: ancient stones, often erected during the Bronze Age as territorial markers, ritual monuments, or boundary points, have a long history of being quietly recycled by later generations who needed something solid and ready-cut to hang a gate on. It is a practical repurposing that blurs the line between monument and farm infrastructure, and makes the archaeologist's job considerably harder.

The stone at Mountirvine was brought to the attention of researchers through local knowledge, passed on by M. A. Timoney, and was recorded in the Archaeological Inventory of County Sligo, compiled by Ursula Egan, Elizabeth Byrne, Mary Sleeman, Sheila Ronan, and Connie Murphy, and published in 2005. Even then, the language of the record was cautious: the stone was described as "possibly" a standing stone reused as a gate pier, which suggests the identification was plausible but not confirmed. By the time the record was uploaded in January 2008, the stone could no longer be located at all. It had not merely lost its prehistoric context; it had vanished from its secondary one as well.