The trouble is that nobody has been able to find it for decades, which makes it a curiosity of a particular kind: a place defined as much by its absence as by anything it contains.

The stone was recorded by G. H. Kinahan in 1884, in what was clearly a systematic survey of the area. Kinahan catalogued it as stone E, noting the cups and gashes on its upper face and giving enough locational detail that the site could, in theory, be revisited. Cup marks are among the oldest and most widespread forms of prehistoric rock art, shallow circular depressions ground or pecked into stone surfaces, whose precise meaning or function remains genuinely unknown. When fieldworkers returned to the coordinates Kinahan had indicated in 1990, the stone was not there. It had not been conclusively destroyed or buried or moved; it simply could not be located. The gap between the 1884 description and the 1990 inspection is more than a century, long enough for a landscape to shift considerably through agriculture, land clearance, and simple overgrowth.

What remains is a record of something seen, measured, and named, suspended in a state of unresolved uncertainty. The stone may still be there, obscured by vegetation or subsumed into a field boundary. It may have been broken up or built into a wall. Kinahan's description is precise enough to be tantalising and too brief to be definitive.