Locally it is known as a bullaun, a term applied across Ireland to stones bearing one or more deliberately or naturally formed hollow depressions, which were traditionally associated with saints, healing, and cursing rites. This particular stone, a roughly 72 by 52 centimetre boulder, has a shallow curved groove running across its top and continuing down one side, most likely the result of prolonged water erosion rather than deliberate carving. That ambiguity is part of what makes bullaun stones interesting: the line between natural wear and intentional shaping is often genuinely unclear, and communities have long read sacred significance into both.

Before the road was widened in the 1980s, the stone sat embedded in the ground, as it had presumably done for centuries, positioned on the townland boundary opposite the Ballybacon road junction. Boundary placement was rarely accidental in early Irish landscapes; liminal spots where territories met were frequently chosen for monuments, markers, and sites of local ritual significance. The stone also bears an Ordnance Survey bench mark inscribed on its side, a surveying reference point cut into the rock during the nineteenth-century mapping of Ireland, which gives the boulder an oddly layered biography: venerated locally as a saint's stone, later pressed into service as a fixed datum point for national cartography. When road-widening works disturbed it, the stone was lifted from the ground and set onto a stone plinth sealed with concrete, preserving it in place but altering the relationship between the stone and the earth it had long been part of.