The gap beneath it, barely enough to admit a person lying flat, is the point. This is St Molaga's Bed, traditionally identified as the covering stone of the saint's tomb, and for centuries people crawled under it in search of relief from rheumatism and other ailments, pressing themselves against the underside of the stone in the belief that contact with it would cure them.

The antiquary John Windele, whose observations were later reproduced in Colonel J.G. Grove White's historical notes on the north Cork area published between 1905 and 1925, described the structure as a kind of kist, a term for a stone-lined box or chamber, formed by the large flagstone resting on low side stones. He wrote that pilgrims would creep into the open space beneath and derive, in his words, wonderful benefit from the act. The slab itself carries carved decoration at its western end: a spiral roughly twelve centimetres in diameter, with two parallel lines extending eastward from it along the length of the stone, narrowing slightly and possibly meeting at the far end. Windele also noted a stone cross resting on top of the slab when he recorded it. The slab measures approximately 1.22 metres east to west and 0.54 metres north to south, substantial enough to dominate the small wall-space it occupies but modest in the way that objects with long devotional histories so often are.

The church it sits within is itself a scheduled National Monument, and the whole complex at Labbamolaga is associated with St Molaga, a figure connected to early Christian activity in this part of Munster. The carved spiral on the slab places it within a tradition of early medieval decorated stonework, though the precise date of the carving has not been firmly established from the available record. What remains clear is the particular quality of the object: a flat stone, a small dark space, and a long history of people making themselves small enough to fit beneath it.