What makes it quietly remarkable is not the stone itself but the layers of interpretation that have accumulated around it over the centuries. By 1857, a local name-book was recording a tradition that this rough flag, barely a metre tall, had once stood over a holy well called Tubber na Downey, also known as the Sunday Well, before the well "moved by some spell" to the south end of the townland, where it was said to remain. The stone, it seems, was left behind.

The 1857 entry, preserved in the Ordnance Survey Revision Name Book, describes "a rude flag about 2.25 ft in breadth and 2.5 ft in height," and the language is worth pausing over: "rude" here means rough or unworked rather than offensive, the standard nineteenth-century term for an uncut prehistoric stone. By 1907, the Ordnance Survey had classified the site differently, marking it on the six-inch map in gothic lettering as a Druid's Altar, a label applied liberally in that era to any megalithic structure whose original purpose was unclear. The connection to a wandering holy well, on the other hand, belongs to a distinctly Irish tradition of sacred water sources with shifting or animated characters, wells said to move in response to disrespect or enchantment. Whether the stone was ever part of a formal megalithic tomb structure, or simply a standing stone absorbed into local lore, the available evidence does not resolve. Archaeological testing carried out nearby to the south-west produced no related material, leaving the stone's prehistory as open as the slope it occupies.