Whether it is still there is another matter entirely. A cupmark is one of the simplest and most enigmatic forms of prehistoric rock art, nothing more than a shallow, roughly circular depression ground or pecked into stone, found across Ireland and Britain and dating in many cases to the Neolithic or Bronze Age. The meaning behind them has never been convincingly settled. At Arduslough, the stone in question carries just one.

Its existence was confirmed by two independent sources, which is normally enough to give a record some confidence. The difficulty is that only one of those sources could say precisely where it sat, and when fieldworkers went to look, searching the site and the surrounding area thoroughly, the stone could not be found. It may be buried under vegetation, shifted by agricultural activity, or simply concealed by the dense ferns that cover the ground. The account of this failed search appears in the fifth volume of the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, published in 2009, which leaves the stone in an awkward category, recorded but unverified, present in the archive but absent from the field.

For anyone inclined to look, the terrain itself is the main obstacle. Rough pasture overgrown with ferns is precisely the kind of ground that swallows low-lying stones without difficulty, and a single cupmark on an otherwise unremarkable rock offers very little to distinguish it from its surroundings even when the vegetation is cleared. The stone may well be there, sitting quietly under the bracken.