The stone is a bullaun, a type of ancient rounded or irregular rock into which one or more shallow basins have been ground, most likely for ritual or devotional use over many centuries. This one is modest in size, measuring no more than 0.7 metres by 0.47 metres, with a single circular basin worn off-centre into its surface, 0.26 metres across and only about three centimetres deep. It does not look like much at first glance. What makes it strange is where it ended up, and how it got there.

According to the historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, the stone was removed from the nearby churchyard of Clara, roughly 150 metres to the east, by a man named Wawtear O'Keeffe, who apparently carried it to its present position single-handed, some time in the early nineteenth century. O'Keeffe, described simply as a strong man, marked the occasion with a provocation: whoever proved as strong as he was should carry the stone back to its rightful place in the graveyard. The stone has remained where O'Keeffe left it ever since. The story sits in an older tradition of bullauns being associated with sacred or ecclesiastical sites, often holy wells or early church enclosures, and being considered too spiritually significant to move without consequence. That O'Keeffe's act was framed as a feat of strength rather than an act of desecration suggests the stone's sacred character was already understood, even as it was displaced. A second bullaun from the same site is incorporated into the roadside wall approximately 70 metres north-west of the church, suggesting the area once held several such stones.