The story attached to it was simple and satisfying: a thief had been caught in the act of stealing the animals by St Abigail, who fixed him and his stolen livestock to the stone until the rightful owner arrived to reclaim them. The Ordnance Survey Field Book of 1839 recorded the stone under the name Lackaduhong, or, tentatively, "the Thief's Flag", with the alternative placename Lackavihoonig also attached. It sat only around two hundred metres north-northeast of St Abigail's well, the kind of proximity that suggests a small, localised cluster of sites associated with the same saint.

The antiquarian James Grove White, writing in his multi-volume collection published between 1905 and 1925, described the stone in some detail and recorded its fate in the same breath. It had already been broken up by the time of his writing, used as road gravel for the new road running between Kanturk and Cork. The note carries a particular flatness: "the stone was considered an antiquity but is now broken up to gravel the new road." Saints' stones of this kind, sometimes called bullaun stones or flagstones with cupped impressions, were often understood as physical evidence of a saint's miraculous power, the imprint left as permanent proof of an intervention. This one survives only in a placename, a bridge fifteen metres to the south still marked as Lackavihoonig Bridge on the 1938 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, and in Grove White's account of what it looked like before the road-builders reached it.