Or rather, there was one, recorded with the laconic confidence of a single word, "Stone", on the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, placed roughly 200 metres from the western shore of the bay. Today, nothing remains visible at ground level. The monument has vanished into the grass, leaving only its cartographic ghost.

W. G. Wood-Martin, the nineteenth-century antiquarian whose 1882 survey of Sligo's prehistoric remains provides the earliest substantive reference to this site, was writing at a time when the stone may already have been compromised or removed. Standing stones are among the most elemental of prehistoric monuments, single upright blocks of varying height erected across Ireland during the Bronze Age and earlier, their original purposes debated ever since. They mark boundaries, burials, astronomical alignments, or perhaps simply the assertion of presence in a landscape. Whatever this particular stone once signified, the Tanrego example had already been reduced to a map annotation by the time anyone thought to formally record it. The site's position near Ballisodare Bay, a sheltered inlet on the south side of Sligo Bay, would have placed it within a landscape long settled and worked, which may partly explain its disappearance.