That particular kind of absence, an archaeological site that has quietly slipped out of reach, is more common than one might expect, and it gives this piece of carved stone an oddly poignant status. When it was last properly described, it measured 1.35 metres by 0.7 metres and carried on its northeastern face a small but considered arrangement of prehistoric markings: two cup-and-rings, a penannular ring, a cupmark, and a scattering of small pockmarks.

Cup-and-ring marks are among the most widespread and least understood forms of prehistoric art in Atlantic Europe. They consist of a shallow circular hollow, the cup, surrounded by one or more carved concentric rings, and they appear on rock surfaces and boulders across Ireland, Britain, and beyond, dating broadly to the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods. A penannular ring is simply one of those concentric rings left deliberately incomplete, a near-circle with a gap. What these motifs meant to the people who made them remains genuinely open: ritual use, territorial marking, and astronomical significance have all been proposed, and none conclusively proven. The boulder at Derryleagh sat on the western edge of a knoll amid rock outcrop and scree, overlooking the Ardsheelhane river valley, a landscape that would have looked quite different several thousand years ago, before the slow accumulation of field drainage, grazing, and agricultural improvement that characterises so much of rural Kerry today.

That improvement is precisely the problem. Local information collected during a later field visit suggests the stone may have been buried or pushed to the margin of the field during land reclamation work. Researchers who searched along the field boundary found no obvious rock art. The boulder is, for now, listed as not located, which in archaeological terms means it exists in the record but not reliably on the ground. It remains somewhere in the vicinity of River Hill, above the Ardsheelhane river, either face-down in improved pasture or tucked against a field boundary, its carved surface pressed into the earth.