Geologists would identify the striations and scattered hollows across its surface as glacial features, the slow work of ice-age movement over stone. Local tradition, however, gave them an altogether more dramatic origin, and for a time the boulder became a site of popular religious devotion.

The boulder is substantial, measuring roughly 4.4 metres east to west and 3.6 metres north to south, with its marked faces exposed on the upper surface and on three sides. The folklore attached to it centres on a cleric from Macloneigh Church, a site recorded nearby, who was pursued and eventually killed beneath a mass rock a short distance to the north. A mass rock, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a flat stone used as an improvised outdoor altar during the Penal Laws, when Catholic worship was suppressed and priests celebrated Mass in secret. In this tradition, the striations on the boulder were understood as the marks of whips, and the hollows as the footprints of bloodhounds used in the chase. By the early twentieth century the boulder had become a focus for popular devotion, drawing people to what was recorded as a penitential station, a place associated with prayer, remembrance, and acts of penance. The layering here is striking: glacial markings misread, or perhaps deliberately reinterpreted, as the physical trace of a persecution story, transforming geology into martyrology.