The standing stone at Castlegrace in County Carlow met a more deliberate end: it was broken up in 1936, and what survived the destruction has since vanished entirely. What makes this particularly frustrating is how much was carved into it. The scholar R.A.S. Macalister, writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland in 1910, recorded a ten-foot granite pillar bearing four plain incised crosses and a double cross, that is, a cross with two transverse bars rather than one. The plain crosses measured roughly four inches square; the double cross occupied about twice that space. The stone was also pitted and scored in ways that Macalister considered a possible ogham inscription, the early medieval script found on hundreds of stones across Ireland and Britain, typically running along an edge and using a series of notches and strokes to represent letters.

The combination of features on the Castlegrace stone was unusual. Standing stones predate Christianity by millennia, but it was common practice in early medieval Ireland to Christianise such monuments by cutting crosses into them, effectively absorbing a pre-existing sacred site into the new faith. A possible ogham inscription on the same stone would have added another layer of early medieval significance. Macalister noted that the scoring was considered only a candidate for ogham, not a confirmed example, which leaves the question permanently open. The fragments of the stone were reportedly preserved after it was broken in 1936, but no one has since been able to account for their whereabouts. A ten-foot pillar of granite does not disappear easily, yet here we are.