According to local tradition, when sunlight fell on the thumb of a carved hand engraved into the stone, it pointed to the hiding place of Mass vessels, the sacred cups and plates used by Catholic priests during clandestine worship in the Penal era, when the open practice of Catholicism was suppressed under British law and clergy operated at serious personal risk.

The carving itself was described in some detail by Coffey in 1995, who recorded it as depicting a human arm from the elbow down, with splayed fingers and a small cross etched into the hand. It had already been named on Robinson's 1977 map as the "carved hand", suggesting it was a recognised local landmark well into the twentieth century. O'Connell, writing in 1991, reproduced a drawing of the engraving and set down the oral tradition connecting it to Penal Times, placing it among a small body of folk art whose meaning was encoded in landscape and light rather than text. The carving belongs to a tradition of informal or vernacular rock scribing, distinct from prehistoric cup-and-ring marks or ogham inscriptions, and likely made by an individual rather than as part of any organised craft.

What complicates the story is that a field inspection carried out in 1999 failed to locate the carving at all. Whether it has been buried by shifting ground, obscured by vegetation on the marshy terrain, or simply lost, is not recorded. The stone may still be there, somewhere among the rock outcrops of that rough pasture, waiting for the right angle of light.