Which makes it quietly unsettling that at least one carved stone recorded there has simply disappeared. A cross-slab, the kind of upright stone incised with a cross that early Irish monks used to mark sacred or funerary ground, was noted in 1955 by the archaeologist De Paor, who placed it as No. 30 on a site plan, standing a short distance to the south-west of a feature he believed to be a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage often used for storage or refuge in early medieval settlements. The slab was recorded with enough confidence to assign it a number and a location. And then it was not there.

When conservation works on the island began in 1978, carried out by the Office of Public Works, the stone could not be found. Subsequent surveys have fared no better. O'Sullivan and Sheehan, compiling their archaeological survey of the Iveragh peninsula in 1996, recorded it under the cautious designation of a "possible cross-slab" and noted simply that it had not been located. Whether it was moved, buried, toppled into the sea during decades of Atlantic weather, or misidentified in the first place is not known. De Paor's figure showing its position survives, but the stone itself remains absent from every subsequent inspection of the site.