In Ballykean, County Wicklow, there is a piece of prehistoric rock art that exists now only on paper, known to us through a Victorian description but absent from the ground where it was said to lie. That description, recorded by Kinahan in 1884, is precise enough to be tantalising: a small flattish stone bearing six cup marks and two gashes, one of them long, narrow, and pointed at both ends. Cup marks are shallow, roughly circular depressions pecked into stone surfaces during the Bronze Age or earlier; their purpose remains genuinely uncertain, which makes each surviving example quietly significant. This one, however, has not been seen since.

Kinahan's 1884 account placed the stone at a specific location in Ballykean, and that location was checked in 1990, but the stone could not be found. Whether it was moved, buried, built over, or simply misidentified as to its exact position is unknown. What remains is the nineteenth-century record itself, detailed enough that someone clearly saw and examined the stone, noted its markings with care, and considered it worth publishing. That kind of documentation was not routine, which suggests Kinahan regarded the piece as genuinely noteworthy. The two gashes he described are less commonly recorded than cup marks in Irish prehistoric rock art, and the pointed, elongated form of one of them would have made the stone relatively distinctive.