It is, in fact, a penitential station, the kind of site where people once gathered to carry out formal acts of prayer and penance, often walking prescribed circuits around sacred points. What sets this particular station apart is that it was once home to twenty-eight cursing stones, laid out on what an early twentieth-century observer described as a crude and curious altar of large limestone blocks.

The antiquarian T. J. Westropp recorded the stones between 1905 and 1908, noting all twenty-eight of them in place on the altar. Cursing stones are smooth, water-rolled stones, typically gathered from rivers or shorelines, that were used in ritualised acts of imprecation. The practice involved turning the stones while reciting a curse against an enemy or wrongdoer, and it was taken seriously enough that certain stones acquired strong local reputations. The association with a penitential station is not entirely contradictory; such sites occupied a charged spiritual space where the boundary between blessing and cursing, protection and harm, was understood to be thin. When the site was examined again in 1997, the altar and its immediate surroundings had changed considerably. Most of the stones were gone, but a small number of water-rolled stones were still found tucked beneath a covering of sod, suggesting either that they had been deliberately concealed or simply overgrown across the intervening decades.