At Coolgarriff in County Cork, a standing stone once occupied the north-east quadrant of a ringfort, one of those circular earthwork enclosures, typically dating from the early medieval period, that dot the Irish countryside in their thousands. At some point between the mid-twentieth century and the present, the stone was removed, and the ground now shows no visible trace that it was ever there.

The stone does not appear on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from 1842 or 1904, which raises questions about whether it was already gone by those dates, whether it was simply overlooked, or whether it was not considered worth recording at the time. It does appear on the 1938 OS six-inch map, and in the same year a researcher named Hartnett visited the ringfort and noted not one stone but two. Writing in 1939, Hartnett recorded stone "A" as standing thirty inches high and measuring twenty-four inches by fourteen inches, set into the bank of the ringfort itself. Stone "B", found within the enclosure rather than on the bank, was considerably flatter, at eighteen inches by twenty-one inches by five inches, suggesting it may have already been lying rather than upright. Whether the two stones were always a pair, whether one predated the other, or whether their relationship to the ringfort was incidental or deliberate, the record does not say.

There is nothing to see at this site today. The ringfort itself remains a separate, recorded monument, but the stones that Hartnett measured with such care have left nothing behind. That gap between the 1938 map and the present is its own kind of archaeological puzzle, a small, unresolved disappearance in the mid-Cork landscape.