That combination, a precisely described object with no current location, gives this particular stone an oddly ghostly quality in the archaeological record. Holed stones are a recurring feature of early medieval and prehistoric Ireland, and while their exact purposes are debated, they appear in contexts ranging from boundary markers to ritual objects, sometimes associated with oath-taking or the formal joining of hands through the perforation.

The stone was recorded in 1915 by H. S. Crawford, who found it lying on the beach close to Ballinskelligs Abbey, the ruins of an Augustinian house on the south Kerry coast. Crawford measured it with some care: roughly four and a half feet long, three feet wide, and eight inches thick, cut from purple slate and pierced by a conical perforation that narrowed from about five and a half inches at the front face to three inches at the centre and four inches at the back. The hole was not centred, sitting slightly off-axis both along and across the stone. Crawford believed it had most likely come from the graveyard surrounding the abbey, displaced perhaps by weather, erosion, or simply the slow disorder that overtakes coastal ecclesiastical sites over centuries. What it originally marked or signified within that graveyard, he did not venture to say.

Since Crawford's account, the stone has not been relocated. It may have been moved, buried under sand, or lost to the sea. The abbey ruins and their surrounding graveyard remain accessible at Ballinskelligs, but the stone itself is, for now, missing from its own story.