It was never officially recorded, never formally marked. But it was known, and women came to it. The stone hollow is called Our Lady's Bed, and for centuries it was believed to protect pregnant women from dying in labour.

The earliest written account comes from Francis Grose, who noted the practice in 1791. He described a cavity near the church door into which pregnant women would enter, turn three times, and recite prayers, trusting that the ritual would see them safely through childbirth. By the time the writer Fennel revisited the tradition in 1906, the rite had accumulated more precise detail. Women seeking the blessings of maternity were required to enter the cavity feet foremost, wriggling in rather than walking, then turn three times to the right, repeating the Trinitarian formula with each turn, before emerging and completing the devotion with three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys. Fennel, who was not especially reverent about the structure itself, describing it as a rough construction resembling a poor attempt at a cromlec (a type of megalithic stone monument, typically a large capstone resting on upright stones), nonetheless recorded its reputation with some seriousness. A local woman told him of an American visitor who had carried out the rite in good faith and subsequently found the promised blessings arriving, as she put it, abundantly and in quick succession.

What is striking about Our Lady's Bed is how it sits at the intersection of pre-Christian ritual form and Catholic devotional practice, a bodily, physically demanding ceremony attached to a saint's stone on a sacred island, absorbed into the language of the rosary without losing the older logic of turning, entering, and emerging. The stone itself may be unmarked on any map, but it was clearly known to women well beyond the immediate locality, including, apparently, those who had crossed the Atlantic and come back.