This one is remarkable for what does not. At Knocknagoun in County Cork, there was once a standing stone, a single upright megalith of the kind erected across Ireland during the Bronze Age, often in association with ritual or funerary landscapes. It no longer exists. There is no visible surface trace, and nobody recorded it disappearing.

What makes the story quietly odd is the paper trail, or rather its gaps. The stone does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1842 or 1904, which were generally thorough in recording such monuments. Yet by 1940 it had been mapped, placed about twenty metres south-east of a fulacht fiadh, one of the burnt mounds found across Ireland that are thought to represent Bronze Age cooking or industrial sites, where water was heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into a trough. The proximity of the standing stone to the fulacht fiadh hints at a cluster of prehistoric activity in this part of mid Cork. At some point between 1940 and the late twentieth century, the stone was removed, its absence noted without explanation. Whether it was cleared by a farmer, broken up, or simply sank into the ground is unrecorded.