That inscription, brief as it is, places it in the reign of Elizabeth I, at a moment when the Dingle Peninsula was a place of competing loyalties, Gaelic landholders, and incoming English influence. The name Rice, likely a family name rather than a given one, suggests someone of some local standing thought it worth marking the year in stone.

The stone was noted by the antiquarian Charles Smith in his 1756 survey of County Kerry, which means it was still visible, or at least accessible, in the mid-eighteenth century. By the time the Archaeological Survey of the Dingle Peninsula was compiled in 1986, it had vanished from sight. Whether it was built into a later wall, buried, broken up, or simply lost to the slow attrition of centuries is not recorded. What remains is a bibliographic ghost: a description of an object that no longer appears where it once was, preserved only in Smith's page reference and the survey that echoes it.

This kind of disappearance is not unusual for early modern inscribed stones in Ireland, which were often moved or repurposed without any record being made. What makes this one linger is its plainness. No elaborate carving, no heraldic device mentioned, just a name and a year, the minimum required to say that someone called Rice was here, and that the year was 1563.