In the townland of Ballygibbon in County Cork, there was once a standing stone, one of those solitary upright megaliths erected across Ireland during prehistory, whose original purpose, whether marker, monument, or something else entirely, has never been fully agreed upon. What makes this particular stone quietly peculiar is the narrow window in which it was ever officially acknowledged. It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1842 or 1904, surfaces briefly on the equivalent map from 1937, noted as a single standing stone on the western side of a railway line, and then disappears from the landscape altogether. No visible trace remains.

The fact that the stone was absent from nineteenth-century mapping does not necessarily mean it was unknown at the time; early OS surveyors were inconsistent in recording prehistoric monuments, and a stone that seemed unremarkable to one survey party might catch the eye of another decades later. What the 1937 appearance confirms is that the stone was still physically present at that point, standing beside the railway, a line that would have been a relatively recent feature in the rural Cork landscape. At some point after that survey, it was removed. Whether it was taken for building material, cleared during agricultural work, or simply shifted during railway maintenance is not recorded.