Measuring just thirty centimetres across, with rounded corners and a shallow circular basin carved into its surface, it would pass for an ordinary architectural offcut were it not for the four holes bored cleanly through the base of that basin. Those holes are the detail that shifts everything, pointing towards a very specific liturgical function and, by extension, towards a vanished religious life in this corner of Wicklow.

The stone is likely a fragment of a piscina, a niche or basin found in medieval churches that allowed the priest to drain water used in the Mass directly into the ground rather than into an ordinary drain. The holes in the base would have served exactly that purpose, letting sanctified water pass downward. The nearest obvious source for such an object is the remains of a church recorded roughly a hundred metres to the north-west of where the fragment now lies. Whether it was displaced during later construction, quarried out for reuse, or simply left where it fell when the church fell into ruin is not known, but the proximity makes the connection difficult to dismiss. Fragments like this one survive precisely because dressed stone was valuable and portable; a piece this small could have been moved anywhere, yet it has not travelled far.