What makes it unusual are two shallow depressions worn into its upper surface, long understood locally as the footprints of St. Olan, pressed into the stone at the moment the saint passed.

The boulder originally stood outside the northern perimeter of an early ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular boundary that marks out the sacred ground of an early Irish monastic or church site. At some point around 1985 it was moved a short distance into the adjacent graveyard, presumably for safekeeping. It forms one of three stations associated with St. Olan, the others being St. Olan's Well and St. Olan's Cap, and together these three form the circuit of a pattern, or "rounds", the traditional practice of walking a prescribed route between sacred stations, often while praying, that was observed on saints' feast days across Ireland. St. Olan's day falls on the fifth of September, and it is on that date that the rounds are still paid at these three sites.

The stone itself is modest in scale, easily overlooked if you did not know what you were looking at. The two depressions are the thing to find on the upper surface, and the graveyard setting, positioned close to that old ecclesiastical boundary, gives some sense of how long this small area has been considered a place set apart.