That hollow, roughly 42 to 45 centimetres across and up to 13 centimetres deep, is what makes it a bullaun stone, a type of ancient carved or naturally shaped rock found across Ireland, often associated with early ecclesiastical sites and, in folk tradition, with healing, cursing, or the gathering of rainwater believed to have curative properties. This one is not large, measuring just over 85 centimetres by 80 centimetres, but its placement, balanced on the top of a wall rather than set into the ground, gives it a slightly awkward, provisional quality, as though it has not quite finished travelling.

And indeed it has not been here very long, in the long view of things. The stone was recovered in 1934 from a bog near the site of Kilcormick, a medieval parish church whose remains still exist nearby. It had been lying there, presumably for some considerable time, having made its way from a site associated with an early church dedication before ending up submerged in bogland. Its recovery and repositioning at Boleyvogue was recorded in the Irish Folklore Commission Schools Manuscripts, a vast archive assembled in the late 1930s when schoolchildren across Ireland were asked to collect local traditions and historical knowledge from their communities. The stone was first reported by Owen Dunbar. Its association with St Cormac, both in the name of the church where it now rests and in the placename Kilcormick, the church of Cormac, suggests a thread of continuity linking the medieval parish site to the present one, even if the stone itself spent a long interlude in the bog between the two.