The standing stone at Farranastig in County Cork is a case in point: a site recorded on historical maps, noted by scholars, and now entirely gone, replaced by ordinary grazing land. What was once a megalithic marker, the kind of upright stone erected across Ireland during prehistory to demarcate boundaries, burial sites, or ceremonial landscapes, survives today only in cartographic form.

The stone appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map surveyed in 1937, confirming it was still standing at that date. By the time Walsh catalogued the site in 1985, the stone had already been removed and the ground converted to pasture. Standing stones of this type are scattered across County Cork in considerable numbers, and their loss through agricultural clearance has been a recurring pattern since at least the nineteenth century. Without the 1937 map record, the Farranastig stone might have disappeared entirely from the historical account, leaving no trace at all.