It was recorded, briefly and without great fanfare, at the turn of the twentieth century, and then it slipped quietly out of the historical record. What makes it worth noting, even in absentia, is what those early observers described: a carved slab bearing two concentric circles joined by a band, with a herringbone design worked into the upper end. That combination of motifs, geometric and deliberate, suggests a marker of some age and intention, the kind of object that was once placed over a grave with considerable care.

The slab appears in two sources from around 1900, cited by Anon in 1900 and by O'Reilly in 1901, both of whom noted its existence in the Laughanstown area without pinning it to a precise location. A later study by Swords in 2009 drew on those earlier references to describe the decorative detail, the concentric circles, the connecting band, the herringbone patterning at the top, but was equally unable to establish where the slab now sits, or whether it survives at all. Granite is durable, and carved funerary slabs of this type have a habit of being reused as building material, incorporated into walls or thresholds, or simply overgrown and forgotten in corners of old farmyards and churchyards. Herringbone carving, which involves a zigzag or chevron arrangement of incised lines, appears on various early medieval and later medieval stonework across Ireland, often as a decorative border or filler motif.

For anyone curious enough to look, Laughanstown sits in the Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown area south of Dublin city, a district that has been significantly built over in recent decades. The chances of encountering the slab in situ are uncertain at best, given that its location was already unknown by the time Swords was writing in 2009. Local graveyards and any remnant field boundaries in the area would be the obvious starting points for a determined searcher. The record itself, fragmentary and unresolved, is perhaps the more honest document: a reminder that even a carved stone, substantial and intentional, can vanish from collective knowledge within a generation or two of being noted.