That partial illegibility was not the result of age alone; when inspectors examined it in August 1961, they concluded the carving was probably no more than two or three hundred years old, placing its origins somewhere in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. What the inscription actually said, who cut it, and why it was placed on that particular knoll were questions the stone never answered, and no detailed record of the text or the stone itself was made at the time.

The 1961 visit came about because land reclamation works were planned for the area, and someone thought to flag the stone before the ground was turned. That caution, it turned out, was not enough. When the site was revisited in April 2008, the stone could not be found. The reclamation works appear to have removed it, though whether it was broken up, buried, or carted off is not recorded. What survives in the local memory is a small, telling detail: a schoolteacher from Aughrim national school, a village a few miles to the east in County Wicklow's neighbouring county, used to bring people out to see the stone when it was still visible. That informal tradition of guided visits, a teacher leading curious people across rough pasture to crouch over an almost-illegible slab, suggests the stone carried some local significance that the official inspection never quite captured.