When investigators went looking for it in October 2018, they came away empty-handed. The stone had been documented, described, even illustrated, and then it quietly slipped from view.

The scholar R.A.S. Macalister recorded the slab in 1913, placing it around 1630 and describing a floriated cross, meaning a cross decorated with stylised floral or leaf forms, with a lozenge-shaped body and a long stem. The base of the stone, he noted, was concealed beneath the sedilia, the recessed seats traditionally set into the wall of a chancel for the use of clergy during Mass. That the stone ran underneath this fixed architectural feature may explain something of its ambiguity: partly buried, partly obscured, it was never fully free-standing. Macalister noted no inscription, which was not unusual for decorative slabs of the period, where the carving itself carried the commemorative weight. His illustration survives, but the stone itself, when sought again over a century later, was not where it ought to have been.