Others simply vanish entirely, leaving only a cartographic ghost. At Rylane in mid-Cork, a standing stone, the kind of upright prehistoric monolith erected across Ireland for reasons that remain genuinely debated, survives in exactly this form: recorded on a nineteenth-century map, but no longer visible on the ground, and not recognised by the landowner of the field where it supposedly stands.

The sole documentary evidence for this stone is its appearance on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, where it is indicated but not named. By the standards of OS surveying in that period, the mark is meaningful enough; fieldworkers were generally careful about distinguishing antiquities from ordinary landscape features. The stone stood, or was believed to stand, on a south-west-facing slope, in what is now tillage land. Whether it was buried during agricultural improvement, incorporated into a field boundary, or simply overlooked by later investigators is not recorded. What remains is a plotted point on an old map and, beneath a ploughed field somewhere in the Rylane area, a possible absence.