These are cupmarks, shallow carved hollows typically a few centimetres across, and they represent one of the more persistently puzzling categories of prehistoric rock art found across Ireland and Britain. Nobody knows with certainty what they meant to the people who made them, and that uncertainty is part of what makes a stone like this one quietly compelling.

The slab itself is modest in scale, measuring roughly 1.55 metres east to west and 0.8 metres north to south, and lying flat on a terrace of ground where natural rock occasionally breaks through the surface. The four cupmarks range between four and five centimetres in diameter and around two to three centimetres in depth, small enough that they could easily be overlooked by someone not deliberately searching for them. Cupmarks of this kind are generally attributed to the Bronze Age, though the tradition may extend earlier, and they appear in a wide variety of contexts across the Irish landscape, from burial monuments to open hillsides with no obvious ceremonial association. What adds an additional layer of interest at Carrigillihy is the presence of an anomalous stone group recorded approximately 35 metres to the north-east. Whether those two features are related in purpose or simply neighbours across the centuries is not something the archaeology has resolved.