At a townland called Mill And Churchquarter in County Waterford, a single old headstone carries a small but telling story about how the past gets recorded, and sometimes misrecorded. For a time, this stone was catalogued as a graveslab, a flat commemorative stone typically laid horizontally over a burial, but the classification was eventually corrected to the more straightforward category of a headstone, the kind set vertically at the head of a grave. The distinction matters, because it determined whether the stone appeared in the official record of monuments worth protecting.

The correction came from a 1898 article by the Reverend P. Power, published in the Waterford Archaeological Journal, in which he surveyed the ancient ruined churches of County Waterford. His reference to the stone at this location made clear that it was a headstone rather than a graveslab, and the record was updated accordingly. As a result, the stone was removed from the Record of Monuments and Places, the statutory list that affords legal protection to archaeological sites across Ireland. It is a quiet reminder that the archaeology of a place is only ever as reliable as the scholarship behind it, and that older local research, sometimes carried out by clergy with a serious interest in antiquity, has continued to shape how sites are understood more than a century later.