At Carrigacooleen in County Cork, a standing stone that had occupied a south-facing slope of pastureland for centuries was deliberately broken apart in 1915, when the landowner had it sledged to pieces. The act was recorded, almost as an afterthought, in a 1937 publication, where it appears under the Irish term gallan, the word for a single upright standing stone. By that point the stone had already been gone for over two decades, reduced from a six-foot pillar of three or four feet in girth to rubble in a field.

The stone had stood roughly fifty metres south of a ringfort, a combination of features that appears frequently across the Irish landscape. Ringforts are enclosed farmsteads, typically of early medieval date, defined by one or more earthen or stone banks, and standing stones are often found in their vicinity, though the precise relationship between the two is not always clear. Whether the gallan at Carrigacooleen was contemporary with the ringfort, older, or positioned in relation to it for reasons now lost, cannot be known. What can be said is that by 1915, the stone's presence in a working field was evidently considered more of an inconvenience than anything else. The owner's decision was not unusual for the period; agricultural improvement and the clearing of land obstacles accounted for the loss of many prehistoric monuments across Ireland during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.