A standing stone, the kind of upright megalith erected across Ireland during prehistory for purposes that remain genuinely uncertain, was present on a south-west-facing slope of pasture land here, noted and mapped, and then removed without leaving any visible trace at the surface. It is, in a quiet way, an absence with a paper history.

What makes the Coollicka stone particularly interesting is the narrow window in which it was documented. The 1842 and 1904 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which together represent over six decades of cartographic observation, make no mention of it. It appears for the first time on the 1939 edition of the same series, recorded as a single standing stone. Somewhere between that survey and the present, it was removed. Whether it was cleared from farmland, repurposed as a gatepost or field boundary stone, or simply broken up is not known. The land offers no clues.

The gap in the earlier maps raises questions of its own. Standing stones are not easy things to overlook, even when overgrown. It is possible the stone was genuinely absent from earlier surveys because it had not yet been rediscovered after falling, or perhaps it was simply missed. The 1939 record is brief, placing it in pasture on a south-west-facing slope, which is all the physical context that survives. There is nothing to visit at Coollicka today, no stone to locate, no site to read in the landscape. The place is of interest precisely because it documents how thoroughly a prehistoric monument can disappear, leaving behind only the fact that it was once seen and written down.