What makes it worth a second look are the circular depressions ground or worn into its outward-facing surface: two clearly defined hollows side by side, each roughly 16 to 18 centimetres across, and the fragmentary remains of a third and possibly a fourth, both broken away at the top and base of the stone respectively. These are bullauns, a term for stones bearing one or more cup-shaped hollows that appear at early medieval ecclesiastical sites across Ireland, though their precise function remains genuinely contested. This particular example measures just under a metre in height and is thin enough, at 15 centimetres, to read more like a slab than a boulder.

The question of what those hollows were actually for has been open since at least 1897, when G.U. Macnamara wrote about the stone in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland. He proposed that the depressions may have been used for grinding or processing plant foods, a practical rather than ritual explanation. Others have pointed out, however, that solution hollows, formed by the slow chemical weathering of limestone by slightly acidic water, can produce very similar shapes naturally, and that what looks like deliberate human work may in part be geology. The stone was mapped and labelled as a bullaun on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch plan of 1897 and again on the Cassini edition of the OS 6-inch map in 1920, suggesting it was recognised as a feature of local significance across several generations. The wider landscape reinforces that sense: roughly 27 metres to the east sits a structure known as Tigh na mBráthar, meaning House of the Friars, traditionally associated with priests who served a medieval church called Cill-mic-an Donáin, or Cowlnabrawher, the remains of which once stood about 205 metres to the southwest but are no longer extant.

The stone sits in a quiet pocket of the Burren, tucked against a crumbling field boundary on a south-facing slope where hazel and bare limestone share the ground in roughly equal measure. The moss that covers much of its surface softens the edges of those contested hollows, making it worth looking closely rather than assuming their character at a glance.