By 1987, when someone went to look for it, it had disappeared entirely below the surface of a field, leaving no trace at ground level. What had been recorded just decades earlier as a modest upright stone, roughly half a metre tall with a narrow rectangular cross-section, had been swallowed by pasture, possibly toppled, possibly buried by agricultural activity, or simply obscured by the gradual accumulation of soil.

The stone first appeared on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map edition of 1940, which suggests it was documented during the mid-twentieth-century revision of that mapping programme rather than in earlier surveys. A field observation in 1939 recorded its dimensions with some care: approximately 0.5 metres east to west, between 0.1 and 0.2 metres north to south, and about 0.5 metres in height. Those proportions describe something relatively slender and slab-like rather than a tall, imposing monolith. Standing stones, as a class of monument, are prehistoric in origin and are found across Ireland in isolation or in loose groupings, their original purpose debated but often associated with boundaries, burial, or ritual landscape marking. What makes the Bolany stone particularly interesting is its apparent relationship to the local terrain. It sat close to the floor of a west-to-east stream valley, with the Blackwater Stream running roughly thirty metres to the north, and two other possible standing stones recorded within the same general area, one about 230 metres to the south-south-west and another around 100 metres to the north-east on the far side of the stream. Whether that clustering reflects deliberate prehistoric placement across a small valley system, or is simply coincidence, is an open question.

The stone's absence from the visible landscape since at least 1987 means there is nothing straightforward to seek out at the site today. What remains is a place where something was, quietly noted and then lost again, with only a grid reference and a set of measurements to confirm it ever stood at all.