The stone rises to 1.35 metres, its long axis oriented northeast to southwest, with packing stones still visible at its base where it was set into the ground. It is the hole, though, that drew people to it, and the traditions attached to it suggest a life far more layered than simple prehistory.

The stone sits on the levelled bank of a ringfort, itself lying within what was once an early ecclesiastical enclosure, so several distinct periods of use overlap at this one spot. A ringfort is a circular earthwork enclosure, typically of early medieval date, used as a farmstead or place of local authority, and the fact that one here is embedded within a church enclosure hints at the long, entangled relationship between older land boundaries and early Christian settlement in Ireland. The hole through the southwest angle of the stone attracted two separate accounts collected generations apart. Writing between 1916 and 1918, a researcher named Condon recorded the belief of a local farmer that anyone suffering from a hurt or wound could be cured by passing a handkerchief through the hole. Earlier still, the antiquarian John Windele noted in 1850 that he had been told a priest once celebrated mass at the stone and tied his horse's bridle through the same opening. Whether that story reflects a real practice of outdoor or itinerant worship, common enough in Ireland during and after the Penal era, or whether it had already become a half-remembered legend by the time Windele heard it, is impossible to say. What remains is the stone itself, and the accumulated weight of those two quite different accounts: one devotional, one curative, both centred on a hole near the top of a slab that the first Ordnance Survey, in 1842, managed to plot roughly eighteen metres in the wrong direction.