This one offers neither, because it no longer exists. On a north-facing slope at Lackabane in County Cork, a standing stone once rose four feet from the ground, its base roughly three and a half feet by one and a half feet in cross section, substantial enough to have been a deliberate and visible marker in the landscape. Today there is no surface trace of it at all.

What makes the stone's disappearance particularly difficult to date or explain is that it was already absent from the record long before anyone thought to look closely. When the Ordnance Survey mapped this part of Cork at six-inch scale in 1842, the stone does not appear, and the same is true of the revised survey carried out in 1904. Its sole documented existence comes from a 1939 record by Hartnett, who noted its dimensions as though describing something still present, or at least recently so. Standing stones, as a category of monument, are among the more enigmatic survivals of prehistoric Ireland: single upright blocks, sometimes associated with burials or territorial boundaries, sometimes with no recoverable purpose at all. This one left behind only a measurement and a grid reference.

There is nothing to see at Lackabane now, and that absence is itself a small piece of the record. Agricultural improvement, field clearance, and simple opportunism have removed countless stones across Ireland over the centuries, most of them unrecorded. That this one was measured at all is something.