Somewhere on a broad ridge near Savagetown in County Waterford, there is a place that was once marked by a standing stone and is now marked by nothing at all. The stone, a single upright slab of the kind erected across Ireland during the Bronze Age or earlier, stood roughly 1.4 metres high according to local memory. At some point in the late 1980s it was removed. No record survives of why, or where it went.

Standing stones are among the most quietly ambiguous monuments in the Irish landscape. They were raised over a long span of prehistoric time, their purposes varying, perhaps, from ritual to territorial to funerary. Many survive because they ended up in marginal land, too awkward to shift and too embedded to ignore. This one, positioned on elevated ground with the commanding aspect that ridge-top sites so often have, did not survive. It exists now only in local description and in the category of things that were catalogued just in time to record their absence.