Cupmarks are among the oldest and least understood forms of prehistoric rock art found in Ireland, simple circular depressions ground or pecked into stone whose original purpose remains a matter of scholarly debate. What makes this particular example quietly arresting is not just the markings themselves but their setting: the stone sits at roughly 130 metres above sea level inside a well-preserved drystone fort, with views stretching out over Castle Haven inlet, Skiddy Island to the south-east, Horse Island to the south, and the open Atlantic beyond.

The stone's history has its own small complications. When the antiquarian Somerville examined the site in or before 1931 and wrote about it, he described a nearby companion piece, a holed-stone with a perforation roughly four inches in diameter, which was still largely intact in 1913. Sometime between that year and 1930, the stone broke clean across the hole, leaving only a semi-circular notch where the full perforation had been. By the time Finlay revisited the subject in 1973, even that remnant feature had become difficult to make out, the stone apparently having deteriorated further in the intervening decades. The cupmarked stone itself, a smooth rectangular slab of shale measuring just over a metre in length, survives intact. A separate piece of rock art is also recorded at the entrance to the cashel, a cashel being a type of early medieval stone enclosure, roughly circular, built without mortar, and used variously for settlement, farming, or defence.