People once came to it before dawn, carrying bottles of water drawn from a nearby well. They said rosaries, washed their eyes in the water, and left rags or small tokens on a tree beside it, in the belief that they would be cured. The stone is known as Cloch Mochaeda, or the stone of St Carthage Mochaeda, and the tradition of paying rounds around it, a ritual circuit made in prayer, was still being described in living memory when schoolchildren in Castlemaine wrote it down as local folklore.

The site sits within a graveyard that is circular in shape, and that circularity is itself a clue to age. In early medieval Ireland, ecclesiastical enclosures were often laid out in this form, demarcating the sacred ground of a monastery or church from the landscape around it. The place-name Kiltallagh derives from Cill Tulach, meaning church of the hillock, and the associations here reach back to two significant early Christian figures. St Carthage Mochaeda, a prominent sixth and seventh-century monastic founder, is said to have been connected to this site, and O'Donoghue, writing in 1893, suggested that Kiltallagh may have been the church from which Carthage was forced to withdraw, with a Bishop Domaingen subsequently placing his brother Faolan in charge. By 1302, the church of Kiltulagh appeared in the papal taxation of the Deanery of Offeria, diocese of Ardfert, valued at 13 shillings and 4 pence annually, with a tithe of 16 pence, modest figures that nonetheless confirm it was a functioning ecclesiastical concern in the medieval period. A Church of Ireland building later rose on what is believed to be the same site, dedicated to St Carthach, and Cusack noted in 1871 that stones from the earlier medieval structure were still scattered about the graveyard.

The schoolchildren's account from Castlemaine adds another layer entirely. Three priests were said to be buried in the middle of the old ruin. On dark winter nights, a large light was seen there. A ruined settlement nearby, called Clounalassan, was thought by local tradition to have been a fort belonging to the father of Fingen Macuda. These details were not presented as legend but as straightforward local knowledge, the kind passed between generations in the ordinary way, sitting alongside the practical instructions for visiting the healing stone before sunrise.