The one at Tonavane, in County Kerry, managed to disappear entirely, swallowed by the sea sometime in the late 1960s. What had stood on that coastline for a prehistoric span of time was gone within what amounts to a geological blink.

The stone was not especially imposing, at least by what limited description survives. A sandstone block, roughly 1.5 metres in height and irregular in shape, it was recorded in the local parish history, "In the Shadow of Sliabh Mis", published in 2001, which drew on older local knowledge and at least one photograph. Standing stones, which were erected during the Bronze Age and sometimes earlier, typically served as markers or ceremonial focal points in the landscape, their precise function still debated. What distinguishes the Tonavane example is not its scale but its fate. The sea claimed it, and with it went any chance of closer study. Michael Connolly, in his 2008 doctoral thesis on prehistoric settlement in the Tralee area, noted its former presence in this stretch of the Kerry coastline, preserving at least a record of what coastal erosion had already erased.

There is nothing left to visit here, which is itself a kind of lesson about how precarious the prehistoric record along eroding coastlines can be. A stone that outlasted millennia was undone in a single season of Atlantic weather.