On the face of it, that description could fit any piece of stray masonry. What made this one worth pausing over was a faint set of marks along its north-western angle, tentatively identified as traces of an ogham inscription. Ogham is an early medieval script in which letters are represented by sets of notches and strokes cut along a central line, typically the edge of a stone, and it is most commonly found on funerary or territorial markers. Here, though, the marks were so weathered as to make any firm reading impossible.

When researcher Elder recorded the stone in 2003, the picture was complicated further by the stone's own material. At 1.25 metres tall and rectangular in plan, it appeared to be of quarried granite and partially dressed, which raised a different possibility entirely: that rather than an ancient monument, it was a scratching post of the kind farmers erected in the nineteenth or twentieth century to give livestock something to rub against. Scratching posts of this type were often made from whatever worked, and dressed granite would have been perfectly serviceable. Elder's view was that the stone had probably been moved to the site by a former landowner, possibly from a nearby enclosure site, rather than having stood on that rise for millennia. The original context, wherever that was, remains unidentified.

The stone is no longer there to examine. It was removed during the construction work, and its current whereabouts are unknown. Whether the ogham marks were genuine, ornamental, or simply the random weathering of a workaday piece of stone is a question that cannot now be settled without the object itself. It exists in the record as an ambiguity: possibly ancient, possibly agricultural, and no longer findable.