Roughly a metre long and shaped by centuries of water erosion into a surface of irregular hollows and channels, it has attracted at least two different saints, two different ailments, and two quite different rituals, all attached to the same unassuming rock beside a public road.

The earliest published reference, noted by folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair in 1958, links the stone to St Michael, identifying the hollow as his mark and attributing to it a cure for backache. The children of Oldtown School, however, recorded something rather different when their folklore was collected for the Irish Schools' Collection, now preserved in the Dúchas archive. One account associates the stone firmly with St Patrick, describing five finger-shaped holes where the saint pressed his hand into the rock; anyone suffering from sore hands who places their own fingers into those depressions is said to receive a cure. A second account from the same school collection keeps the backache cure but reattributes it to Patrick rather than Michael, explaining that the stone served as a tethering post for the saint's horse while he blessed a nearby well. To cure a bad back, a person must twist their arm around the stone three times. The same stone, then, carries the imprint of two saints, heals two complaints, and demands two entirely different physical gestures depending on which tradition you follow.

The stone sits on the north side of the entrance to Grallagh graveyard, adjacent to the road, so it requires no special access or permission to see. The hollows are natural water channels rather than deliberately carved features, which is part of what makes the accumulated folklore around them so characteristic of how the Irish landscape absorbs and reinterprets natural curiosities over time. It is worth pausing to look at the surface closely, since the irregular depressions that generations of people read as finger marks or a horse's tether ring are entirely the work of erosion.