These are cup-marks, a form of prehistoric rock art found across Ireland and Britain, made by grinding or pecking depressions into stone surfaces. Nobody knows with certainty what they meant to the people who made them, which is part of what makes them quietly unsettling. The boulder measures roughly three metres along its longer axis and sits low to the ground, its surface largely level and encrusted with lichen. Gorse has crept over the south-western corner, and it is possible that further markings lie beneath it.

The cup-marks range considerably in size, from two centimetres to ten centimetres in diameter, suggesting they may not all be the work of a single hand or a single moment. More striking is a cup-and-ring motif near the eastern corner of the boulder's north-west quadrant, where a small central hollow, four centimetres across, is encircled by a ring eight centimetres in diameter. Cup-and-ring carvings are among the more elaborate expressions of this prehistoric tradition, and their presence here places the boulder within a wider landscape of such monuments along the Iveragh Peninsula. The site was first identified by Joyce Tansey and subsequently recorded by Aoibheann Lambe as part of the LIVE project, a cross-border heritage initiative part-funded through the Ireland-Wales cooperation programme of the European Regional Development Fund. Before that work, it had gone unrecorded.

The boulder sits above the Kerry Way walking route with open views towards Cnoc na Saulagh and, beyond it, Kenmare Bay and the Beara Peninsula. The carved surface faces upward, so the markings are best seen in low raking light, when shadows settle into the hollows and make them readable in a way that flat midday sun does not allow.