That, in fact, is precisely how it was recorded in 1843, labelled simply as a 'Rubbing Stone' on a detailed estate map, and left at that. It took another century and a half, and a careful eye applied to old cartography, before anyone thought to ask whether the stone might be considerably older and more deliberate than its humble annotation suggested.

The site sits in improved pasture in County Limerick, roughly 450 metres northeast of a separate possible standing stone. A standing stone is exactly what it sounds like, a single upright block of stone set into the ground, usually dating from the prehistoric period, though the purposes behind individual examples vary and are often unknown. This particular stone does not appear on any Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps, which is part of what made it so easy to overlook. Its identification as a possible prehistoric monument came in 2008, when researcher Brian Hodkinson examined an 1843 estate map of Oldtown Ryan, drawn up for the estate of the Earl of Kenmare and now held in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. That map's offhand label, 'Rubbing Stone', is the kind of practical note a land agent would make without any archaeological intent, yet it preserved the stone's existence across nearly two centuries of otherwise unremarked farmland use. The monument's outline has since been confirmed through Ordnance Survey Ireland orthophotography taken between 2005 and 2012, and through a Google Earth image dated September 2020.

The stone is located in working agricultural land, so access is not straightforward and any visit would require the landowner's permission. There is nothing here in the way of signage or formal designation; this is a site known largely to local researchers and those who follow the Irish Archaeological Research database. What makes it worth knowing about is less the stone itself than the paper trail behind it, the way a throwaway annotation on a Victorian land agent's map quietly kept a potential prehistoric monument on record until someone thought to look again.