The gesture seems almost modest now: a cup-and-ring motif measuring roughly twenty centimetres across, its central depression about six centimetres wide and nearly two centimetres deep, surrounded by a carved ring three centimetres wide. Cup-and-ring carvings, which appear across Atlantic Europe and are generally associated with the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods, are among the most enigmatic marks left on the Irish landscape. Their purpose remains genuinely unknown, which is part of what makes encountering one so oddly affecting.

The outcrop itself is substantial, a fractured sandstone mass roughly six metres east to west and three and a half metres north to south, rising to between four and five metres at its southern and south-western edges. The decorated surface is comparatively small, a triangular area of about sixty by sixty-five centimetres with a gentle eastward aspect. Alongside the best-preserved cup-and-ring, there is a single cupmark, a plain circular depression without a surrounding ring, located about twenty-seven centimetres to the south, and a partial ring motif roughly thirty centimetres to the east. The rock sits at around thirty-eight metres above sea level on a south-facing slope, partially covered in heather and vegetation, with Kilcoe Castle visible approximately eight hundred metres to the south-south-west. The area around it is not isolated in terms of prehistoric carving: another piece of rock art lies about sixty metres to the north-north-west, and a cupmarked stone sits some two hundred and eighty metres to the south-east, suggesting this ridge held some significance, however difficult to define, for the people who worked it.

The decorated surface faces east and sits within what is now a garden plot, the carvings themselves easy to miss against the naturally pitted and weathered sandstone. Some of the other depressions on the rock are thought to be naturally formed rather than carved, which is a useful reminder of how much patience, and ideally a low raking light, it takes to read rock art with any confidence.