The Ordnance Survey mapped it in 1839 as a baptismal font, and repeated the label without revision in 1908, but the stone is almost certainly something older and stranger than that classification suggests. It is a bullaun stone, a type of ancient rock, usually glacial or dressed, bearing one or more cup-shaped depressions ground into its surface. Their precise origins and purposes remain debated, though they are associated with early Christian and pre-Christian sacred sites across Ireland, and the water that collects in their basins has long been considered to have curative or ritual properties.

The stone sits to the south of an Augustinian abbey, a proximity that likely explains how it came to be recorded as a font at all. The Augustinian presence at Aghade would have given the site an obvious Christian frame of reference for the surveyors working in the 1830s, and a stone hollow near a religious house would naturally be interpreted through that lens. Whether the stone predates the abbey, or was simply absorbed into the devotional life of the community there, the notes do not say. What is clear is that its identity was flattened into something more legible, and the original designation stuck across at least two editions of the national mapping project.