It was marked on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map under the name 'Praying stone', a local designation that hints at the ritual significance once attached to it. That name places it in a well-recognised category of early Irish sacred objects: bullaun stones, boulders or rocks bearing one or more cup-shaped depressions, typically associated with early Christian sites and sometimes with folk practices of prayer, cursing, or healing. The water that collects in the hollows was often considered to have curative properties.

The scholar Liam Price recorded the stone in 1957, describing it as a large boulder with four artificial hollows on the bank of the Dargle. Inspections carried out in 1989 and again in 2012 found no visible trace of it. The river at this point has been significantly altered by storm damage over the years, and it is considered likely that the bank on which the boulder rested was simply carried away by flood waters at some point after Price's documentation. The stone, if it survives at all, may now lie somewhere beneath the riverbed or further downstream, unrecognisable amid other debris.

What remains, then, is essentially an absence: a place on a map where something once stood, named and noted, and now gone. The 'Praying stone' of Deerpark is a small reminder that the archaeological record is not fixed. Rivers move, banks collapse, and objects that were old when Price found them can disappear entirely within a few decades.