A bullaun is a boulder or bedrock surface into which one or more cup-shaped depressions have been ground, almost certainly by human hands. The water that collects in these hollows was, and in some places still is, considered to have curative or protective properties. They are found near early church sites with some regularity, and Cill Mhuirbhigh, whose name gestures toward an early ecclesiastical enclosure, is exactly the kind of location where one might expect to encounter such an object.

The place-name Cill Mhuirbhigh combines the Irish word for a church or monastic cell with a reference to the sea inlet or sandy bay nearby. The Aran Islands were a significant centre of early Christian activity, and the landscape of Inis Mór is dense with the physical traces of that period, from the great cashels, which are dry-stone ringforts, to small enclosures, slabs, and carved stones scattered across the limestone. Bullaun stones occupy a slightly ambiguous position in this world; they predate Christianity in some cases, but were frequently absorbed into the devotional geography of early medieval settlements, acquiring associations with particular saints or rituals of healing. Beyond its location at this named ecclesiastical site, the specific history of this particular stone is not fully documented in available sources.