The problem is that the marker is in the wrong field, the stone itself may never have been prehistoric, and the most likely location of the original feature is now buried beneath a shopping centre car park.

When archaeologist Clare Mullins carried out an assessment of the mapped field in 1997, ahead of a planned housing development, she found no archaeological features whatsoever. A handwritten note on the file map suggested the stone had actually stood in the field to the east of where it had been plotted. That area, however, was already gone. The 1910 edition of the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map shows numerous boundary stones in the same vicinity, and there is a plausible explanation for the confusion: the feature recorded as a standing stone may have been a War Department Boundary Stone, one of several markers used in the nineteenth century to delineate the military lands attached to Columb Barracks. Such stones, functional and plain, would have been easy to mistake for something far older, particularly once the institutional memory of their purpose had faded. The barracks itself takes its name from Saint Columb, and the military presence at Mullingar shaped the area's landscape for well over a century, leaving behind boundaries both visible and, in this case, thoroughly lost.