The stone is called Clogh-an-Airgid, meaning "the stone of the silver" in Irish, and its classification as a penitential station suggests it may once have served as a stopping point for religious observance, a practice common in Ireland where particular rocks, wells, or natural features became fixed points on devotional circuits. The precise nature of what took place here, and why silver figures in the name at all, is no longer known.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp noted the stone in 1900, describing it simply as a large rock by the roadside carrying a name derived from some forgotten legend. His phrasing is telling: even at the turn of the twentieth century, the story behind the name had already slipped out of living memory. The stone appears on the OS 25-inch map on the southern side of the road, though the 1916 OS 6-inch map places the name on the northern side, a small discrepancy that complicated matters considerably when researchers went looking in 1998. On that inspection, the stone could not be precisely located. Close to where it should be, on the northern side of the road about ten metres inside the wall, lies a feature known as Seehaun Inneenboy, or Inniwee's seat, a named seat or hollow that adds another layer of local memory to the immediate area without quite resolving the question of the stone itself. The site was listed in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996 as a potential site identified by name alone, which is a category that acknowledges a place may once have mattered without being able to say exactly how or why.