The stone is not lost in the dramatic sense; it almost certainly still stands among the other grave markers in the abbey precinct. It has simply become illegible, its incised lettering worn back into the surface by three centuries of Irish weather, indistinguishable now from the unmarked and the anonymous.

The headstone was recorded in the early 1900s by Fitzgerald, who noted it as an incised stone bearing Hallinan's name and the date 1697. Incised headstones of this period were relatively modest affairs, the inscription cut directly into the face of the stone rather than raised in relief, which made them particularly vulnerable to erosion over time. When the Clare Roots Society undertook a systematic survey of Clareabbey's graveyard inscriptions in 2008, they found that a great many of the slabs documented a century earlier had weathered to the point where the text was no longer readable. The Hallinan stone was among those that could not be identified at all. Clareabbey itself is a medieval Augustinian foundation near Ennis, and its graveyard continued in use long after the abbey fell into ruin, accumulating centuries of burials and markers in various states of preservation.

What this particular record quietly illustrates is the pace at which the material evidence of individual lives disappears. Charles Hallinan was significant enough to someone in 1697 that a stone was cut and set in his memory. By the early twentieth century the inscription was still there to be read and noted. By 2008 it was gone, absorbed back into the texture of the stone itself.