At its centre, pushing up through the ground, sits a large quartz-type stone bearing two smooth, bowl-shaped depressions, each roughly 21 centimetres across. At the base of those hollows, votive coins have been left, quietly accumulating in the way that small offerings do at places where old habit and religious feeling overlap.

The stone is a bullaun, a type found at early Christian sites across Ireland. The word refers to any rock, usually associated with an ecclesiastical context, that carries one or more rounded cup-like cavities, thought to have been used for grinding or for holding water considered to have curative or sacred properties. The water that collects in a bullaun was often believed to possess healing power, and the tradition of leaving coins or other small tokens at such stones is one that has persisted, in many cases, from early medieval times into the present. This particular example, measuring roughly 74 centimetres by 59 centimetres and standing about 23 centimetres proud of the ground, sits within the earthwork remains of an ecclesiastical enclosure at Cloghleigh, the kind of roughly circular boundary that once defined an early monastic or church site. The hawthorn grove that now surrounds it has its own resonances; hawthorn has long been associated in Irish tradition with liminal or sacred ground, and its presence here, whether planted deliberately or self-seeded over generations, gives the whole arrangement a layered quality that is more than merely coincidental.