People walked around it at prescribed circuits, brought water from a nearby well before dawn, washed their eyes, and left rags on a tree as tokens of devotion. The stone is known as Cloch-Mochaeda, the stone of St Carthach Mochaeda, and its presence here points to a layer of religious life that long predates the tidy Protestant church building that now occupies the same ground.

The site is the medieval ecclesiastical enclosure of Kiltallagh, from the Irish Cill Tulach, in the parish of Kiltallagh, diocese of Ardfert, barony of Trughanacmy. The graveyard itself is circular, roughly 46 metres in diameter, a shape that often signals an early Christian origin, since monastic enclosures of that period were frequently laid out in this form. A Church of Ireland church dedicated to St Carthach was built here in 1816 under the Board of First Fruits, a body that funded the construction of Protestant churches across Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By 1871, it was noted by the writer Cusack that the medieval church had stood on exactly the same spot, and that scattered stones from the earlier structure were still visible around the graveyard. The present building received internal renovations and a vestry extension around 1875, and its limestone gateway with cast-iron gates dates to around 1820. In 2016, test trenches were excavated by Tracy Collins of Aegis Archaeology Ltd across a proposed extension to the graveyard; six machine-cut trenches found nothing of archaeological significance. Folklore gathered from Castlemaine School added its own texture: three priests were said to be buried within the old ruin, a light was seen there on dark winter nights, and a ruined settlement nearby, called Clounalassan, was linked in local memory to the father of Fingen Macuda. The Cloch-Mochaeda stone, which appears 123 metres to the east of the church, drew people seeking cures for their eyes, arriving in the hours before daylight with bottles of well water and rosaries, observing a ritual that sat quite comfortably alongside Catholic devotion even on Church of Ireland ground.