The word "once" is doing a lot of work here, because the stone is gone. Not moved to a museum, not relocated to a safer spot; simply gone, its whereabouts unknown. What remains is a paper trail of scholars noting its absence, and a single early drawing that preserves at least some sense of what the carving looked like.

The stone's existence is attested in a drawing made by Dr. Petrie, published in the Dublin Examiner in October 1816, which gives it a surprisingly well-documented early life for an object that would subsequently disappear. By the time researchers were compiling formal records, the stone had already vanished. O'Reilly noted it in 1901, Crawford catalogued it in 1913, describing it as a squared standing stone inscribed with concentric circles, and Ó hÉailidhe returned to the subject in 1957, each scholar essentially recording its absence rather than its presence. Concentric circle carvings of this kind are associated with prehistoric rock art traditions found across Ireland and Britain, where circular or spiral motifs were incised into stone, though their precise meaning or function remains debated. That such a stone stood in a graveyard complicates things further, since decorated prehistoric stones were frequently reused in early Christian burial grounds, sometimes incorporated into church fabric, sometimes simply left standing nearby.

The graveyard itself, recorded under the Sites and Monuments Record reference DU025-003005, sits off Pine Forest Road in the Dublin Mountains, south of Rathfarnham. The knoll it occupies is steep and grass-covered, so the approach requires a little effort. There is nothing to see of the inscribed stone itself, which makes a visit more of an exercise in historical imagination than in direct observation. What you can do is stand in a place where early nineteenth-century antiquarians once recorded something that clearly struck them as worth drawing and publishing, in a quiet hillside graveyard that has outlasted the object it once contained.