It appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1939, marked plainly as a single upright stone on an east-facing slope of pasture, but it is absent from the equivalent maps of 1842 and 1904. At some point after 1939, the stone was removed entirely, leaving no visible trace at the surface.

The narrow window of its recorded existence raises more questions than the notes can answer. Standing stones are among the most enigmatic monuments in the Irish landscape, erected most commonly during the Bronze Age, though their precise purposes remain debated. Some mark boundaries, some are associated with burial, some may have had ceremonial or astronomical functions. What is clear at Gowlane is that a stone significant enough to be surveyed and mapped in 1939 had somehow escaped the notice of nineteenth-century mapmakers, or was not yet considered worth recording, and was then gone before anyone thought to look more closely. Whether it was toppled by a farmer clearing land, broken up, buried, or simply moved, the record does not say.