The stone is gone now, removed sometime after 1845, and what remains is mostly the idea of it: a place where power was conferred, a footprint that was deliberately destroyed, and a name on an old map.

The practice of inauguration stones was well established across Gaelic Ireland, where a chief would stand or place his foot upon a stone as a formal act of accession, signalling continuity with the land and with those who had come before. At Leck, this ceremony continued until the seventeenth century, and a map of Ulster made in 1609 records the hill as 'Mullagh-lest, so called of a stone there, on which McMahon is made', a phrase that captures both the ritual and the way the place took its very identity from it. The stone itself was substantial, though accounts vary considerably: one description gives its dimensions as roughly twelve feet by ten feet and three feet high, while another records it as closer to five feet by four feet at the same height. A sketch preserved in the Irish Folklore Collection shows it as roughly spherical. At some point, a footprint in the stone, the kind of hollow associated with inauguration rites elsewhere in Ireland, had become part of its meaning, but in 1809 the landowner obliterated it. The stone's remains were cleared away altogether after 1845, though its location was still marked on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1834, a last cartographic acknowledgement of something that had already begun to disappear.