The initials were 'HR' and the date was 1725, carved into the side of a slab described as coffin-shaped, roughly five metres long, two and a half metres wide, and over a metre thick. By any measure it is a substantial piece of stone, the kind of object that does not move easily or often. And yet it has been moved, and with that movement the inscription has vanished from view entirely.

The stone was recorded in 1943 by a Faughnan, whose file note captured those precise Victorian-sounding measurements in feet and inches before metric equivalents became the convention. What the initials 'HR' refer to is not recorded: a landowner, a boundary marker, a commemorative carving, something else altogether. The date 1725 places it firmly in the early eighteenth century, a period of considerable land redistribution and estate consolidation across Ireland, when prominent stones were sometimes used to mark property limits or record significant transactions on the land. Whether that context applies here is speculation; what is certain is that someone in 1725 considered this particular stone worth marking, and that Faughnan thought it worth documenting more than two centuries later.

The stone's current position is no longer the one described in 1943, and the face bearing the inscription is no longer accessible. What remains is the stone itself, large enough to locate if you know what you are looking for, but effectively mute now that the carved side is hidden.