Whether it is still there, or indeed whether anyone has reliably seen it in decades, is genuinely uncertain. That ambiguity is itself part of what makes Derrynablaha interesting: a site documented in the archaeological literature, plotted on maps, and yet, when investigators went to look, not there.

What the earlier surveys describe is a rounded, earthfast boulder, meaning one set firmly into the ground rather than free-standing, measuring roughly 2.3 metres by 2.1 metres. Its decorated surface slopes upward to the north-west and carries a range of motifs typical of prehistoric Atlantic rock art: simple cupmarks, which are shallow, roughly circular depressions pecked into the stone surface; a cup-and-ring, where a cupmark is enclosed by one or more carved rings; and a cupmark with a radial groove extending outward from it. More unusually, two pairs of parallel grooves, the longer pair running to 0.74 metres, converge on the cup-and-ring motif, and these grooves are themselves crossed at right angles by further carved lines. The site appears in the work of Emmanuel Anati in 1963 and in a 1973 survey by Finlay, and was later included in the comprehensive archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula published by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in 1996.

When fieldworkers returned to the coordinates on record, they found upland heath pasture, a remnant peat and stone field boundary to the north-east, and rocks bearing only natural pock marks and striations. The carved boulder could not be located. Other rock art sites in the same area were eventually found roughly 83 metres to the south-west of the given coordinates, which hints at how easily a recorded position can drift between surveys conducted generations apart. Whether the Derrynablaha boulder is buried under encroaching peat, was misidentified in earlier accounts, or simply awaits someone standing in the right spot, remains an open question.