That, at least, is the tradition recorded in 1838 by the Ordnance Survey Letters, a remarkable series of antiquarian field observations compiled as part of Ireland's first systematic mapping project. The stone was known locally as Leím an Asail, meaning the Ass's Leap, and it was classified as a bullaun stone, a type of ancient rock, usually glacial or worked, in which one or more cup-shaped depressions have been hollowed out. Such stones are found across Ireland, often associated with early Christian sites and holy wells, and the hollows were commonly attributed to saints in local tradition, whether as knee-prints, finger-marks, or other bodily impressions.

The Ordnance Survey record, published later by O'Flanagan in 1927, is the earliest known written source for the stone, and it was on the basis of this single reference that the site was included in both the Sites and Monuments Record of 1991 and the Record of Monuments and Places of 1997. The connection to St. Patrick is fitting for the area; Crosspatrick, the nearest named townland, carries the saint's name directly. Holy wells dedicated to or associated with Patrick are scattered across the west of Ireland, and the attribution of miraculous impressions in stone to a saint's mount, rather than to the saint himself, is an unusual but not unheard-of variant of the tradition.

The difficulty is that no trace of the stone has been found at the holy well. Its exact location is uncertain, and its precise nature, whether it ever displayed the characteristic cup-marks of a true bullaun or was simply a local curiosity with an evocative name, cannot now be established. What survives is the description: a stone beside a well, a story about an ass's knees, and a place-name that kept the memory going long enough for someone to write it down.