It looks, at first glance, like any other grave marker. Look more closely, however, and the stone reveals a considerably stranger biography: one end is covered in cupmarks, shallow circular depressions pecked into the rock surface in prehistory, and in at least one corner the cups on either face have been bored so deeply that they have broken clean through the stone, leaving a hole that passes from one side to the other.

Cupmarks are among the most ancient and enigmatic forms of prehistoric rock art found across Ireland and Britain, their meaning still genuinely unresolved. The Ballintemple stone, a shale pillar measuring 0.75 metres long and 0.29 metres wide, carries nine cups on one face and seven on the other, ranging from 2 to 5 centimetres across. Several cups on opposite faces appear to have been positioned deliberately opposite one another, a detail that raises questions about whether the carving was conceived with both sides of the stone in mind from the outset. At some later point in the medieval period, the prehistoric carving was evidently forgotten, or simply ignored, and the stone was repurposed as a window sill in the medieval church that once stood at Ballintemple. Masons finely carved the plunging internal and external bases of the window near the centre of the stone; the window opening itself was some 31.5 centimetres wide, with an external splay of 43 centimetres. At a still later date, the sill was taken from the ruined church and set upright in the graveyard to serve as a headstone, its third recorded function across what may be several thousand years. The layered reuse was documented by Chris Corlett, and a photogrammetric 3D model of the rock art was subsequently produced by the Wicklow Rock Art Project, based at the School of Archaeology, University College Dublin, under the direction of Dr. Clíodhna Ní Lionáin.