Others have quietly ceased to exist, at least above ground. At Sandyhill in County Cork, there is a standing stone that no longer stands, recorded as sitting on an east-facing pasture slope with no visible surface trace remaining. The category persists, the stone does not, and yet the site continues to be listed as an archaeological monument, a placeholder for something that was once considered significant enough to erect and is now significant mainly for its absence.

Standing stones are among the most enigmatic survivals of prehistoric Ireland. Raised as single upright slabs or pillars, sometimes alone and sometimes in loose association with burial sites or ancient boundaries, they appear across the Irish landscape in their thousands, most of them undated and poorly understood. What they marked, whether a grave, a territorial limit, a meeting point, or something else entirely, is rarely clear. The Sandyhill example, located in the east and south Cork region catalogued in the 1994 Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, has lost even the ambiguity that a visible stone would offer. What remains is a grid reference, a field in pasture on a slope, and the knowledge that something was once there.