This is a bullaun stone, a type of hollowed rock found at early Christian sites across Ireland, often associated with ritual use or the grinding of materials. It is easy to step over without noticing, which would be a pity, because the site around it contains layers of occupation that stretch from a possibly pre-Norman church, through the Knights Templar and their successors, to a Victorian-era rebuilding that left its own odd imprint on the earlier fabric. The whole complex sits on level ground near the head of a small east-west valley, with the estuary of the Barrow, Nore, and Suir visible roughly 400 metres to the west.

The Templars received this land through a grant by Henry II in 1172, which conveyed to them the church of St Alloch, a figure of mixed Saxon and Welsh royal descent whose name, rendered in Irish as Cill Eallóg, is the origin of the place-name Kilcloggan. The fact that the name preserves a personal dedication suggests there may already have been a church here before the Templars arrived. Tradition had attributed the foundation to O'More of Laois in the late twelfth century, but the documentary evidence points to the royal grant as the more likely basis. A remarkable inventory of the Templars' possessions at Kilcloggan, drawn up in 1307 just before the order's suppression, lists the church's contents: a missal worth 20 shillings, an antiphonary worth 5 shillings, a goblet valued at 22 shillings, books, and vestments. When the Templars were dissolved after 1312, the property passed to the Knights Hospitaller of St John of Jerusalem, who likely moved the centre of their local operations to a castle about 1.2 kilometres to the north-north-east in the fifteenth century.

The original church itself has gone, but the tower that stood beside it survives, altered considerably around 1830 when a Church of Ireland church was appended to the north via a new passage. That later building is now a roofless shell. The Victorian builders added crenellations, enlarged openings, and inserted a fireplace into the medieval tower, while designing their new church with three lancet windows in each gable to echo the pointed windows that John O'Donovan, writing around 1840, had recorded in the east gable of the old building. Inside the graveyard, just south of the tower, a limestone graveslab carries an incised cross with fleur-de-lys terminals and, at the foot, a raised Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God symbol associated closely with the Knights Templar. It is one of the more tangible connections to the order's presence here, lying quietly in the grass.