These are bullaun stones, boulders or slabs bearing one or more cup-shaped depressions ground into their surface, the precise original purpose of which remains debated. They are associated with early Christian sites and holy wells across Ireland, though their use likely stretches back further, and the water that collects in their basins was long regarded as having curative or ritual significance.

What makes this particular pair quietly curious is that they did not start out here together. One of the stones is composed of quartz, measuring roughly three quarters of a metre in length, with a basin about thirty centimetres across and twenty centimetres deep, and it was brought from Killinierin, the townland immediately to the north. The second came from Ballynestragh townland itself. Both were noted by Esmonde in 1899, by which point they had already been gathered into the demesne grounds, displaced from whatever earlier context, sacred or otherwise, they once occupied. The act of collecting such objects was not unusual among nineteenth-century landowners with antiquarian interests, though it does mean that whatever landscape meaning these stones once held has been largely severed.