The eastern stone still stands, about 0.81 metres high at the base of a road boundary fence, roughly 150 metres south of the local graveyard at Cill Maoilchéadair. The western stone has since been swallowed by the ground.

The legend, recorded by Cuppage in 1986, runs as follows: a thief attempted to make off with a cow, and was stopped not by any human hand but by a holy man whose intervention caused the thief's foot to sink into one stone and the cow's hoof to become fixed in the other. The pair are sometimes called the Cow and Thief's Stone. What is less clear, as Cuppage noted, is what the stones were originally put there to do. Their relationship to the nearby ecclesiastical site, if there ever was one, remains uncertain. They may have had some early boundary or ritual function, or they may simply have been standing in that spot long enough for a good story to accumulate around them, as tends to happen with unusual stones near old church sites in Ireland.