That ambiguity is, in a way, the entire story. Standing stones are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland, solitary uprights of unknown purpose that have survived millennia largely because they are too large and inconvenient to move. This one, however, seems to have managed the trick of disappearing, or nearly so, and then reappearing, depending on whom you asked and when.

In 1872, the geologist G. H. Kinahan described the stone as "a remarkable, tall standing stone," which suggests it was conspicuous enough to catch an observer's eye in passing. By the time the second edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was published in 1898, it had apparently been removed, or at least was no longer considered worth marking. That might have been the end of the matter, except that Lord Killanin, writing in 1954, stated that the stone still survived in the early 1950s, quietly contradicting the cartographic silence of the previous half-century. Whether the mapmakers missed it, or whether Killanin was working from older or imprecise information, is not clear. What is certain is that no visible surface trace survives today. The stone exists now mainly as a paper trail, a short sequence of disagreements between observers separated by decades, none of them quite closing the case.