What makes it quietly curious is a single deliberate feature: a circular hole, roughly four centimetres in diameter, bored slightly off-centre near the broader end of the stone. It is a modest thing, easy to overlook even if you know to look for it.

The slab itself is a gently tapering piece of worked stone, 1.1 metres long and 0.45 metres wide at its broader end, narrowing to about 0.25 metres at the pointed tip, and only six centimetres thick throughout. Holed stones are a recurring but not fully understood feature of early medieval Irish religious sites. The holes were sometimes used for oath-taking or the sealing of agreements, with hands passed through as a form of binding gesture, though other ritual or practical functions have also been proposed. This example sits within the monastic complex at Glendalough, the valley of the two lakes in County Wicklow, which grew up around the sixth-century hermitage of St Kevin and became one of the most significant ecclesiastical centres in early Christian Ireland. Whether this stone was ever a focal point for such practices, or served some entirely different purpose, remains an open question. Its position, wedged behind other slabs against the wall, meant that even those who recorded it could not examine it fully.