The stone in question is a bullaun, a type of early medieval rock with one or more artificial cup-shaped hollows ground into its surface; such stones are found across Ireland and are frequently associated with saints, healing rituals, or cursing traditions. What makes this one unusual is not the bullaun itself but the fact that, as of 1979, no surface remains were visible at all. The stone may still be there, buried or obscured beneath the soil of a children's burial ground. Or it may not.

The claim about St Patrick's knees was recorded in 1837 by John O'Donovan, the scholar and topographer who worked extensively on the Ordnance Survey Name Books, compiling local knowledge, folklore, and field observations across Ireland. His note describes the burial ground as containing 'a very remarkable stone bearing the supposed impression of St Patrick's knees', which places this site within a wider tradition of associating physical marks in stone with the bodily presence of the saint. Children's burial grounds, known in Irish as cilliní, were typically used for the interment of unbaptised infants, and they occupy a particular place in the Irish landscape, often ancient, often unmarked, and carrying a complex weight of grief and folk belief. The location of this one, on the eastern side of such a ground in Co. Westmeath, is plotted on the Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map, though the monument itself had already become invisible to fieldworkers by the late twentieth century.