A bullaun is a boulder or bedrock stone with one or more cup-shaped depressions worn or worked into its surface; they appear at early medieval ecclesiastical sites across Ireland, where they were used for grinding, for holding water, or for purposes that remain genuinely unclear. This one is embedded so firmly into the tree's roots that the two seem almost to have grown together. Low orthostats, upright slabs of stone, protrude from the ground around the tree, forming a rough circular enclosure that may once have been a cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort. A cross has been cut into the bark of the oak, marking the site's later use as a cillín, a children's burial ground, a function it served through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Locally, the place is called the Fairy Rath of Mota, and the hollowed stone was known as a holy water font, with a tradition that Mass was celebrated here during the Penal Laws, when Catholic worship was suppressed and clergy operated in secret. The site may originally have been a church or ecclesiastical enclosure; the bullaun stone bears a close resemblance to others associated with the nearby townland of Carrigagown North, which suggests an older network of connected sacred sites in the area. By 1937, however, the monument was firmly embedded in a different kind of story. That year, Moira Carroll of Brookfield, a pupil at Killadangan National School, collected a local tale in which a hunchbacked man named Paddy the Nailer passed the rath one evening, heard fairy music, and whistled the tune so well that the fairy king ordered his hump removed. A second hunchback, Mick Kane, heard the story and went to try his luck, but being a poor whistler he ruined the tune; the king, displeased, had Paddy's hump placed on Mick Kane's back alongside his own. The account was recorded with a note that elderly people in the district insisted it was true, because their parents had known Mick Kane with both humps. The story belongs to a widespread folk type found across Ireland and beyond, but its attachment to this particular stone and tree gives it an unusual specificity, grounding something ancient and largely inexplicable in the very local and the almost believable.