The standing stone known locally as the Long Stone, in the townland of Longstone in County Limerick, has managed both. Successive editions of the Ordnance Survey placed it in three different locations, each shifted from the last by tens of metres, and by the time archaeologists came looking in 2008, there was nothing left to find at all.

The stone itself was once a substantial presence. The Ordnance Survey's own field recorders described it as a nearly erect limestone pillar, leaning slightly to the east, standing 2.9 metres tall and nearly a metre wide at its base, set within a hilltop earthen enclosure, the kind of circular raised monument, defined by a central mound, outer ring, and surrounding ditch, that appears at various prehistoric sites across Ireland. The people of the area called it simply the Long Stone, a name which also passed to the townland. The Ordnance Survey Name Book confused it with a cromlech, which is a different monument type altogether, typically a megalithic tomb with a capstone, though the error was noted and corrected by later researchers. T.J. Westropp recorded the pillar in 1916 to 1917, still standing at 2.9 metres in its enclosure. By April 1957, however, an OPW report by H.A. Wheeler found it had recently fallen. Lying on the ground, it measured roughly 3 metres long, 2.3 metres wide, and 0.6 metres thick, and a visible tidemark on its surface showed that less than half a metre of the base had ever been set into the earth, which is a surprisingly shallow footing for a stone of that size.

For anyone visiting the elevated pasture in Longstone today, the Archaeological Survey of Ireland's 2008 survey is worth bearing in mind: no surface remains were visible at that point, and the stone does not appear on aerial or satellite imagery taken between 2005 and 2018. There is a natural rock outcrop about 100 metres to the south-west, and signs of small-scale quarrying in the same field, which may complicate any attempt to read the landscape. The site sits on a slight north-east-facing slope with open views in most directions, about 180 metres east of the townland boundary with Ardroe. The enclosure and burial mound it once occupied are recorded as a separate monument. What a visitor is more likely to encounter now is the shape of the ground itself, the slight elevation, the field boundaries, and the question of what happened to a three-metre slab of limestone sometime in the mid-twentieth century.