It was once the centrepiece of a small cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort, and a nineteenth-century observer thought it looked very much like an altar. By the time later fieldworkers came to check on it, the landowner could only confirm that the stone was still there, somewhere underfoot, buried.

The first detailed account of this cluster of monuments comes from a writer named Hitchcock, reporting in 1854 to 1855 on excavations carried out on land belonging to the Messrs. Hilliard at Ballydunlea. He had gone out to investigate a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage and chamber used in early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge, which had come to light when a farm wall was being dismantled. That souterrain ran roughly east to west, its entrance passage sloping downward to an inner chamber, with lintel stones Hitchcock checked carefully for inscription and found bare. In the adjoining field, closer to the river, he noticed something he considered equally worthy of attention: a cashel built, he thought unusually, from small stones, with a large and roughly worked stone standing at an oblique angle at its centre. He returned to sit on it more than once, turning over in his mind what purpose it might have served. A later field inspection confirmed that this stone had indeed stood at the heart of the cashel. By that point, however, it had already been swallowed by the earth, and the cashel itself had no visible trace above ground, its form lost, its embankment reduced to a mound tangled with blackthorn and briars.