Somewhere in County Waterford there is a small flagstone that was once a grave marker, then a curio at a clergyman's house, and is now simply lost. The object in question is a cross-slab, a type of early medieval stone bearing an incised cross, often associated with burial or with the marking of sacred ground. What makes this particular example quietly strange is not its age or its form but its disappearance: it was documented, handled, and placed somewhere specific within living memory, and yet no one now knows where it is.

The stone came to light in 1940 during excavations carried out by M. J. Bowman at Ballygarran, a site on the crest of an east-facing slope enclosed by three concentric earthen banks, a form known as a trivallate enclosure, and one that had been proposed as the site of an early church. What Bowman found was a small, irregularly shaped flagstone bearing an incised cross of Greek type, roughly six inches in length and, at some later point, extended by a second hand into a Latin cross. The Greek cross, with its four equal arms, is among the oldest Christian cross forms found on Irish stones; the subsequent modification into the longer-stemmed Latin cross suggests the stone had more than one moment of use or meaning. Bowman himself was cautious about its original context, noting that it may have been moved from elsewhere, though its position on what resembled a grave pointed towards a burial. By 1941, when Bowman published his account, the stone had been removed to Canon Power's house. After that, the trail goes cold. Its present location remains unknown.