The wall, running for around 60 metres between the northern boundary of the Sheastown townland and the former entrance to Sheastown House, is unremarkable to the casual eye. But the rubble incorporated into it may once have been an object of local veneration, a bullaun stone, that is, a boulder or outcrop featuring deliberately carved or worn cup-shaped depressions, a form found widely across early Christian Ireland and often associated with saints and sacred sites.

The site acquired two distinct but overlapping identities in the historical record. Writing in the 1870s, the antiquarian Shearman described a rock within the demesne of Sheestown bearing "peculiar indentations" understood locally as the footsteps of St. Patrick, known in Irish as "Ciscaem Padruig." By the time Carrigan was writing in 1905, the tradition had shifted slightly; the same depressions were said to have been formed by Patrick's knees as he knelt in prayer, and the place was recorded on the Ordnance Survey map under the name Gloonpatrick. That name preserves the Irish word "glúine," meaning knees, anglicised here as "gloon." Whether the hollows in the stone were understood as footprints or kneeling-impressions, the interpretive impulse was the same, to read the landscape as having been physically shaped by sanctity. Shearman noted that part of the rock had already been broken up and used in the boundary wall, and Carrigan confirmed that by his time the stone itself had been destroyed entirely.