That absence is not simply the result of time and weather. The monument was deliberately taken apart, most likely before 1910, and its fate was documented in enough detail to make the loss feel unusually precise and, in its way, rather melancholy.

The circle was a five-stone type, a form of monument found across Cork and Kerry in which a small ring of upright standing stones, known as orthostats, is arranged around a central space. At Pluckanes, the internal measurement along the main axis ran to roughly 3.3 metres, with the axis apparently oriented north to south. The individual stones ranged from about 0.9 to 1.8 metres in length and up to 0.9 metres in height. Pieces of pottery were recovered during the destruction, suggesting the site had once seen some kind of ritual or domestic activity, though what exactly the pottery represented was not recorded. The Ordnance Survey Memoranda for County Cork, compiled in 1933, supply an unusually candid account of what happened: four of the five stones were buried by the landowner in the same field where they had stood for millennia. The fifth was removed to the south-east corner of the field and repurposed as a gate pillar. By 1938 that stone was still visible enough to appear on the six-inch Ordnance Survey map, where it was labelled Gallán, the Irish term for a standing stone used as a single upright marker. At some point after that it too disappeared, and today there is no visible surface trace of any part of the monument. About 75 metres to the north-east, a three-stone row once stood as well, a separate but likely related prehistoric feature, and it is gone in the same way.