It measures roughly 2.2 metres long and just over a metre high, its surface broken by irregular fissures. In those hollows, rainwater collects, and local people bless themselves with it. The boulder is known as a bullaun stone, a term used for rocks, usually of great age, that bear cup-shaped depressions or cavities associated with ritual or devotional use. What makes this one quietly arresting is not the stone itself but the persistence of the practice around it, a gesture of blessing drawn from a crack in ancient rock.

Bullaun stones are found across Ireland and are often associated with early Christian sites, though their origins are sometimes older and their precise original function is not always clear. The tradition of using the water that gathers in their hollows, whether for blessing, healing, or cursing, is well documented in Irish folk practice and tends to survive long after the formal religious context around a site has faded or been forgotten entirely. At Knockaloura, the continuity is underlined by the fact that a second boulder carrying the same local tradition lies roughly 440 metres to the north-east, suggesting the area held some significance that extended across the landscape rather than clustering around a single point. Whether these two stones ever formed part of a broader devotional geography, or whether their association is simply the product of a landscape where such rocks were common and memory long, the notes do not say.