Look more closely, though, and one end of it has been carefully hollowed out into a small basin, just eight inches across and three inches deep, cut to hold holy water for the faithful entering a place of worship. This kind of vessel, known as a holy water stoup, was a standard feature of medieval Irish ecclesiastical sites, used for ritual blessing on entry. What makes this one linger in the mind is its sheer solidity: the stone was recorded as weighing around sixty pounds, a deliberate, weighty object carved with modest precision.

The earliest detailed account of it comes from the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1838 to 1840, a remarkable series of antiquarian notes compiled as part of the great mapping project of that era. The observer recorded the stoup and noted that it "appears to be of great antiquity," which even at that time placed its origins well beyond living memory. The same account mentions that nearby lay part of a square baptismal font, a separate object used for the Christian rite of baptism, suggesting that the immediate area once held a modest but reasonably equipped ecclesiastical site. The church and graveyard with which these fragments are associated have long since fallen into ruin, leaving these carved stones as the most tangible evidence of what once stood here.