The reason is straightforward and quietly telling about the modern Irish landscape: forestry has swallowed it whole.

Standing stones are among the most enigmatic monuments in the Irish countryside. Erected most commonly during the Bronze Age, they served purposes that remain genuinely uncertain, ranging from territorial markers and burial indicators to astronomical alignments and meeting points. Most survive precisely because they were too large and too deeply set to bother removing. This one in Walshtown More, according to local knowledge, is still standing, somewhere beneath or behind a canopy of commercial plantation timber. The gap between what local memory holds and what formal survey can verify is not unusual in Cork, a county with an exceptionally dense concentration of prehistoric monuments, many on land that has changed use dramatically over the past century. The 1994 Archaeological Inventory of County Cork noted the stone as unlocated for the same reason, and that situation had not changed as of early 2009.