It is recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1936, and a researcher named McCarthy noted in 1977 that a stone was still standing upright in the field near the entrance to an adjacent souterrain, yet today there is no visible surface trace. The stone has either been removed, buried, or simply swallowed by centuries of agricultural activity, leaving only its cartographic ghost behind.

What makes the site more than a footnote about a missing stone is what surrounds it. The souterrain near which it once stood is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, a type of structure commonly built in early medieval Ireland, often associated with ringforts and used for storage or refuge. Aerial photography has revealed that both the standing stone and the souterrain sit within a levelled circular enclosure, the kind of earthwork that would once have been visible as a raised bank or ring at ground level. That enclosure is now detectable only from the air, its outline erased by ploughing and grazing over many generations. Together, the three features, the enclosure, the souterrain, and the vanished stone, suggest a site that was once a coherent and probably significant place in the early medieval landscape, even if the surface today gives nothing away.

There is little to see on the ground at Caherdesert, and that is rather the point. The site belongs to a category of place that exists more fully in maps, records, and aerial photographs than in any physical experience a visitor might have. The knoll is there; the pasture is there; the rest requires a certain kind of attention to absence.