Around 1985, according to local memory, it was removed and buried in a nearby quarry to the south-east, leaving the ground above it unmarked and the historical record above it rather more complicated than anyone might have anticipated. The stone had never appeared on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1842 or 1904, which means it entered the archaeological literature late and left the landscape quietly, without official notice in either direction.

The difficulty, as researchers discovered, is that this stone may have been at least three different things depending on which account you consult. Grove White, writing between 1905 and 1925, described a small triangular-shaped rock in a field to the west of a neighbouring stone, measuring roughly one foot three inches in height, with five cup marks on its surface, each about three inches in diameter. Cup marks are shallow, circular depressions pecked into stone surfaces, found across prehistoric Ireland and Britain, whose precise purpose remains uncertain. Grove White wondered aloud whether the marks might simply be weather erosion. Then in 1934, a researcher named Bowman recorded what he called a stone row on Mrs. O'Donoghue's land, consisting of three stones arranged at intervals, with the central one already fallen and moved to a nearby field fence. He measured each stone carefully, noting that stone (a) stood 24 feet east of the central stone's original position, and stone (c) sat 21 feet to its west. By 1937, a recorder named Broker visiting what appears to be the same general area on 'Mrs. Jas. Donoghue's' land found only a single stone remaining, five feet high and very wide at the base, with what he described as two holes like eyes near the top. Whether these accounts describe the same stones in different states of survival, or a cluster of related monuments that scholars have been quietly arguing over ever since, is not entirely resolved. Two further stones associated with this group survive in the vicinity, one roughly 45 metres to the north-east and another about 150 metres to the south, both still recorded on the 1938 Ordnance Survey map.