The catch is that nobody is entirely sure where it stands. It is the kind of monument that raises as many questions as it answers, known to scholarship but elusive on the ground, logged in the record books yet resistant to being pinned to a map.

The stone's earliest documented mention comes from the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1837, a remarkable series of field notes compiled by OS researchers as they worked their way across Ireland gathering antiquarian and topographical detail for the first large-scale mapping of the country. In those letters, the stone is described simply as a boundary stone in the mountains near Ballinascorney. Standing stones, which are single upright stones set into the ground by prehistoric communities, served many purposes across Irish prehistory, from ritual and funerary functions to territorial markers, so the boundary interpretation recorded in 1837 may reflect the stone's later use rather than its original one. The reference was later cited by O'Flanagan in 1927, but even that record stops short of giving precise coordinates. The research compiled by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy notes plainly that the stone has not been precisely located.

For anyone drawn to this corner of south County Dublin, the Ballinascorney area is accessible via the roads that climb from Tallaght and Brittas into the foothills, a landscape of open moorland and scattered farmland that still feels genuinely remote despite its proximity to the city. The difficulty here is that the stone itself offers no guaranteed reward at the end of a walk; it may be obscured by vegetation, lying fallen, or simply overlooked in the rough mountain terrain. What the area does offer is the particular atmosphere of upland Dublin, and the quiet satisfaction of looking at a landscape knowing that somewhere within it an old stone was considered significant enough to note, name, and then, somehow, lose track of entirely.