But at Caherbaroul in mid Cork, those depressions, each roughly ten centimetres across and five deep, are traditionally understood as the knee prints of people who knelt here to pray, pressed into the rock through long repetition of devotion. The stone is a bullaun, a term for a boulder or slab bearing one or more cup-shaped hollows, found widely across Ireland and often associated with early Christian sites. Their exact origins and original purposes remain debated, but many became focal points for local veneration long after their initial use was forgotten.

The Caherbaroul bullaun is D-shaped, with its straight edge resting against the base of a cross slab, suggesting the two stones were deliberately paired or at least understood as belonging together. It sits in a small field just to the south-east of a ringfort, and close to what may be an early ecclesiastical enclosure, a cluster of features that implies a long, layered history of activity on this ground. Notably, the stone does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of either 1842 or 1904, which means it was either missed by surveyors or not yet visible above ground at those dates, a reminder that the mapped record of any landscape is always partial.