The stone is gone, removed at some point before the earliest detailed mapping of the area, and yet enough was written down about it to give some sense of what once occupied this patch of Mid Cork ground.

The stone does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of either 1842 or 1904, which means it had already been taken away, or destroyed, before the earlier of those surveys was completed. Two researchers noted its dimensions at different points in the twentieth century, drawing presumably on older local knowledge or earlier documentation. Condon, writing in 1916, recorded the stone as standing five feet five inches tall, twenty-four inches wide, and twelve inches thick, the proportions of a fairly substantial upright slab of the kind commonly erected in prehistoric Ireland, often as burial markers or territorial indicators. Hartnett, writing in 1939, gives a height of just forty-eight inches for the same stone, a discrepancy of roughly seventeen inches that is never explained and now probably never will be. Whether the two researchers were working from different sources, measuring different remnants, or simply calculating differently is impossible to say.

What remains is not a place to visit so much as a place to think about. The Courtbrack stone belongs to a category of loss that Irish archaeology knows well: monuments that survived millennia only to disappear quietly in the modern era, leaving behind a handful of numbers on a page and a question about what, exactly, was lost with them.