That, in a way, is precisely what makes it interesting. A standing stone once occupied a south-west-facing slope in pastureland here, recorded on a 1904 Ordnance Survey map under the Irish term "gallaun", the common designation for an upright prehistoric stone. But by the time the antiquarian R.A.S. Macalister went looking in the 1940s, it was gone, along with every other stone on the land.

The explanation Macalister was given locally was, to put it mildly, deflating. According to his informants, the Board of Agriculture had ordered all the stones removed over concerns that cattle rubbing against them, using them as scratching-posts, might spread infection between animals. The same locals went further, telling him that the stones had not been ancient monuments at all, but had been put up in comparatively recent times for precisely that bovine purpose. The sole exception, they said, was an ogham stone, an early medieval inscribed monument, located within a nearby ringfort roughly seventy metres to the north. That stone apparently escaped both the clearance and the scepticism. The 1842 six-inch Ordnance Survey map records no standing stone here at all, which lends at least some credibility to the story that these were not prehistoric survivals, though the absence of a feature from an early map is not always conclusive evidence it did not exist.

What remains is a quietly odd footnote: a listed archaeological site with no visible surface trace, commemorating stones that may never have been archaeological in the first place, removed on public health grounds related to livestock.