Placed side by side, they form something close to a shallow depression, the kind of concave hollow associated with bullaun stones, which are roughly worked stones bearing one or more cup-shaped basins that appear throughout early medieval Ireland and are often found near ecclesiastical sites. But these two pieces do not quite fit together, and the mismatch is telling.

The current thinking is that the fragments may not belong to the same object at all. One piece has a straight external face, which points towards it being a church stoup, a small basin used for holding holy water in a medieval religious building, rather than a true bullaun stone. The other is a more naturally rounded piece that may once have been part of a genuine bullaun, broken at some point and then paired with the broken stoup. At some stage, someone placed both fragments together on the pier of the gateway leading down to Tober Moling, the holy well nearby, perhaps to preserve them, perhaps because the hollow they formed together seemed significant enough to keep. The result is an object that appears unified but is probably a quiet act of improvisation, two unrelated fragments given a second life as a single curiosity at the threshold of a sacred site.