The prehistoric carving on this stone is not the dramatic spiralling composition associated with sites like Newgrange; it is something quieter and more puzzling. Cut into the smoother of the two blocks is a single large ring, nearly a metre across, its circumference incised to a depth of just five millimetres. At its centre, four small cupmarks, shallow circular depressions made by repeated pecking, have merged into a single irregular hollow. A line of pickmarks runs as a chord across the south-east side of the ring, and a narrow natural seam of quartz runs alongside it. What appears to be a child's footprint nearby turns out, on closer inspection, to be a solution mark, a hollow formed by natural weathering rather than any human hand. The letter "J" has been scratched inside the ring at some unknown later point, the kind of casual inscription that crops up on ancient stones across Ireland and tells you nothing useful about the person who made it.

The site sits at 199 metres above sea level on a south-south-west-facing slope of mountain heath, with views stretching to Cahersiveen and Valencia Harbour. The rock art itself almost certainly predates everything else associated with this place by several millennia; ring and cupmark carvings of this kind are generally understood to belong to the Neolithic or Bronze Age, though their precise purpose remains genuinely unclear. What makes this particular boulder more layered is its later history. The two blocks are locally known as Maum-an-Aifrinn, a name that translates roughly as the Mass Gap or Mass Pass, and they are traditionally associated with use as a mass rock. Mass rocks are boulders or flat stones where Catholic priests celebrated the Eucharist in secret during the Penal Law era of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Catholic worship was outlawed under British legislation. The choice of a pre-existing carved stone for this purpose may have been practical, may have been coincidental, or may reflect something harder to pin down about how places already understood as marked or significant get drawn back into use across different periods. A ruined church is clearly visible to the south-south-west, adding yet another layer to what is, at its surface, just a cracked rock on a hillside.