That uncertainty is precisely the point. In August 1997, archaeologists recorded a large flat-topped natural stone bearing around ten possible cupmarks, small circular depressions ground into rock surfaces by prehistoric peoples, whose precise purpose remains a matter of scholarly debate, though they are found across Ireland and Britain and are generally associated with Bronze Age activity. The stone sat among rough hill pasture, cutaway bog, and the ghostly outlines of relict field boundaries, the kind of faintly traced enclosures that speak to long-abandoned agricultural lives. Then, in January 2005, a follow-up visit found nothing. The boulder, if it was ever quite where the record placed it, had effectively vanished from the landscape.

That disappearance is not as dramatic as it sounds. Cutaway bog is unstable ground, subject to erosion and to the slow subsidence that follows peat extraction. A large stone can shift, sink, or simply become buried beneath encroaching vegetation between one visit and the next, particularly across a gap of nearly eight years. The surrounding outcropping rock would not have made identification straightforward either, and a flat-topped boulder among other flat-topped boulders, without a reliable grid reference precise enough to bring a searcher to within a metre or two, could easily be overlooked. The ten cupmarks described were themselves noted only as possible, a hedge that suggests even the original observers were not entirely certain what they were looking at.