The stone is a bullaun, a type of boulder or block bearing one or more rounded cup-shaped hollows ground into its surface. Bullaun stones appear throughout early medieval Ireland, often in association with ecclesiastical sites, and the water that collects in their basins was traditionally considered to have curative or protective properties. What makes this particular example quietly puzzling is not its form but its history, or rather the absence of one.

When the archaeologist Judith Cuppage recorded the stone in 1986, she noted that its original provenance was unknown, and that it appeared to have been placed deliberately in front of the cross, set into the ground in such a way that it now obscures the foot of the shaft. The cross it accompanies is a separate monument with its own designation, but the relationship between the two objects remains unclear. Nobody knows where the bullaun came from before it ended up in its present position, nor why it was moved and arranged in front of the cross rather than simply set beside it. The result is an arrangement that looks intentional but cannot be fully explained, two early Christian objects standing together with no documented connection between them.