At Rahan in County Cork, a stone measuring 1.73 metres in length was removed from its original position around 1980 and now lies beside a field fence to the east of where it once stood, on a south-facing slope in pasture. It is not a dramatic ruin or a collapsed monument so much as a displaced one, separated from whatever purpose or meaning its erection once carried.

What makes the Rahan stone particularly curious is its absence from both the 1842 and 1905 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps. Standing stones are prehistoric monuments, typically erected during the Bronze Age, and they appear across Ireland in considerable numbers. Many were recorded by the nineteenth-century surveyors who produced those early OS maps, so a stone that escaped both the 1842 and 1905 surveys either went unnoticed, was considered unremarkable at the time, or had already lost enough of its visible presence to be passed over. It is impossible now to say which. The stone itself, 0.8 metres wide and 0.35 metres thick, is not especially large by the standards of the type, but it would have been a legible feature in the landscape when upright.