Look closer, and you notice the hole, roughly nine centimetres across, pierced through the upper right of the slab. This is a penitential station stone, a type of object associated with acts of devotion or penance at early Christian sites, where pilgrims or worshippers would pass a hand or finger through the opening as part of a ritual. The stone has been lying flat for some time now, but it was not always so.

When the antiquarian W. F. Wakeman recorded the stone in 1895, it was standing upright in the graveyard, some fifty metres to the south-east of the early medieval church at Roscam. The site sits within an early ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval boundary that marks out the sacred ground of an early Irish monastic or church settlement. The slab itself is modest in size, 66 centimetres long and 43 centimetres wide, rectangular in its upper portion with a roughly triangular lower section that would have been set into the ground when the stone was upright. At some point after Wakeman's visit, it was moved and laid flat on a modern grave plot. A medieval graveslab now rests nearby on the same plot, to the south of the holed stone, the two objects gathered together almost incidentally, as if the grave plot had become an informal repository for displaced medieval stonework.

The juxtaposition is quietly odd: a stone that once prompted ritual movement, people reaching through its small off-centre hole as part of an act of faith, now immobile and horizontal on a 20th-century burial. The hole is still there, still pierceable by a finger if you were so inclined, though the choreography of penance it once demanded has long since been forgotten at this particular spot.