Cupmarks, the simplest and oldest form of rock carving found across Ireland and Britain, are shallow circular hollows ground or pecked into stone; their purpose remains genuinely unclear, though ritual, astronomical, and boundary-marking functions have all been proposed over the years. This particular slab carries somewhere between fifteen and eighteen of them, depending on who was counting and when, arranged irregularly across its face.

The stone was found in 1877 near the eastern end of the Upper Lake at Glendalough, the early medieval monastic site in County Wicklow also known as Sevenchurches. George Henry Kinahan recorded it in 1884, noting the mica-schist composition and the weathered surface. At some point after its discovery it was moved to stand beside St Kevin's Kitchen, one of the surviving ecclesiastical buildings on the monastic site. By 1950, when Harold Leask described it in his survey of Glendalough's national monuments, the slab was being measured at roughly two and a half inches thick, with the cupmarks tentatively attributed, at least in part, to weathering rather than entirely to deliberate carving. The ambiguity is telling: Leask did not commit to a confident reading, and that caution has not entirely dissolved since.

The slab is now housed in the Stone Store at the Glendalough Visitor Centre, taken indoors from the outdoor monastic enclosure. Researchers at the Wicklow Rock Art Project, based in the School of Archaeology at University College Dublin under the direction of Dr Clíodhna Ní Lionáin, have produced a photogrammetric three-dimensional model of the stone, which allows the surface texture and the cupmarks to be examined in detail without handling the original.