Both faces are covered in cup-marks, the shallow circular depressions pecked into rock that represent one of the oldest and most widespread forms of prehistoric art in Ireland and Britain. What makes this particular piece quietly arresting is the contrast between its two faces: one side carries eight cup-marks arranged in a linear sequence, the other holds fourteen arranged in semi-circular patterns. The same hand, or at least the same tradition, working in two different compositional logics on opposite sides of the same stone.

The stone is said to originate from Bluid in west Cork, and it passed through a remarkable set of hands before reaching its current home. It came from the collection of Admiral Boyle Somerville, a figure better known to Irish history for his violent death in 1936 than for his antiquarian interests. Somerville was shot dead at his home in Castletownshend by the IRA, who accused him of recruiting for the British armed forces. He was also, it turns out, a collector of prehistoric material from the west Cork landscape around him. The stone was donated to University College Cork in 1938, with the donation recorded in a catalogue entry of that year. The scholar E. Shee described it in detail in 1968, providing the measurements and the account of its cup-marked faces that remain the basis for how it is understood today.