According to local knowledge, the cup marks, those shallow circular depressions worked into stone surfaces during the Bronze Age and found across Ireland and Britain, are on the face now pressed against the fence. The stone was moved at some point from its original position lying flat on the roadside, and in the process whatever was carved into it was effectively hidden from casual view.

What makes the stone's history a little stranger is the gap between how it appears in two successive Ordnance Survey maps. It does not appear at all on the 1842 six-inch map, yet by 1904 it had been marked with the label "Altar", suggesting that by the early twentieth century local people associated it with something ceremonial or at least out of the ordinary, even if its carved face was already obscured. The word "altar" on old maps of this kind often reflects folk memory or local tradition rather than any documented liturgical use, and it is a reminder that ordinary communities were quietly cataloguing their own landscapes long before formal archaeology arrived to do the same. The stone itself is substantial, roughly 1.8 metres long and 1.4 metres wide, though only about half a metre thick, so it would have been a conspicuous presence even lying flat at the roadside.