Those basins, ranging from roughly 30 to 47 centimetres across, are what make it a bullaun stone, a type of ancient carved or worn rock found widely across Ireland and typically associated with early Christian sites, holy wells, and patterns. The precise age and origin of the hollows are rarely easy to pin down, but their connection to ritual and sacred water is a recurring theme wherever these stones appear.

What makes this particular example quietly odd is that it is no longer where it began. According to Seymour, writing in 1917, the boulder was removed from a holy well located just over a kilometre to the south, immediately outside the village of Toem, and carried to its present position in Shanacloon. It was not the only stone displaced from that well. A second bullaun stone from the same site was taken to a garden approximately 230 metres to the north-east of the well. The result is a small scatter of separated objects, each now sitting at some remove from the sacred context that originally gave them meaning. The holy well remains in Toem; the stones that once accompanied it have ended up elsewhere, in a field and a garden respectively, separated from each other and from their source.