The name alone carries a particular weight in an Irish context, evoking the Penal era when Catholic worship was driven outdoors and priests celebrated Mass at makeshift altars in fields and on hillsides, often with lookouts posted against discovery. Whether this stone's role as a gathering point dates to that period or stretches back further is not recorded, but the Ordnance Survey Name Books note plainly that Mass was celebrated here in former times.

The slab itself is a trapezoidal piece of stone, wider at the top than at the base, standing just under a metre high. Its orientation runs roughly northeast to southwest, and it occupies what feels like a deliberate position: the southeast face looks out over Lough Currane to the south, while Ballinskelligs Bay opens to the west. That southeast face is the better preserved of the two, carrying a grooved Latin cross with broad triangular expansions at each of its terminals, a decorative feature associated with early Christian stonework in Ireland. The opposite face bears a smaller cross of similar form, though more worn. The stone's full Irish designation, Cloghanaffrin, appears to be a phonetic rendering of Cloch an Aifrinn, and the name has clearly preserved a memory of use that the landscape itself no longer makes obvious.