In fact, it may not have been standing for a very long time. What survives is not the stone itself but its paper trail, a single annotation on a map, and then silence.

The 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey Fair Plan, one of the detailed working maps produced during the first large-scale mapping of Ireland, marks the presence of a standing stone at this location in the townland of Macetown. The OS six-inch maps, which followed and became the standard reference series for the Irish countryside through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, do not show it at all. Whether the stone was already gone by the time the surveyors returned, or whether it was simply judged too minor or too uncertain to record, is not known. By 1983, when the site was formally visited and assessed, no surface remains were visible. More recently, aerial photography has confirmed what the ground-level inspection found: nothing there that resembles a prehistoric monument. The stone has vanished so completely that even the shadow it might cast from the air is absent.