The stone, an irregular slab measuring roughly 1.3 metres by 1 metre, carries three carved bowls arranged in descending order down its sloping upper surface, each with a steeply cut rear wall that grades to a shallower lip. This is a bullaun stone, a type of ancient monument found across Ireland in which one or more rounded depressions, or basins, have been ground or pecked into a large rock, often associated with early ecclesiastical sites or prehistoric activity. What gives this particular discovery its additional layer of interest is its location: it sits on waterlogged ground immediately to the south of the spot where the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded a smelting house, a small industrial building associated with the processing of metal ore. The conjunction of prehistoric carved stone and post-medieval industrial site in the same soggy corner of Wicklow is the kind of quiet collision that tends to go unnoticed until a drain needs digging.

The stone was not entirely without context when it emerged. Records held by the National Museum of Ireland from 1930 make clear that this area once held a remarkable concentration of similar stones. In January of that year, a man named Donal Ó Dubhghaill wrote to Dr A. Mahr at the museum describing between six and eight large boulders on the farm of one Joseph Murphy at Crone Beg, each bearing cup-shaped depressions, some holding as much as two quarts of liquid. Ó Dubhghaill believed them to be grinding stones, and described his reading of wear patterns on one three-cupped example where he could trace where operators had sat and where their hands had rested. He had already removed one single-basin stone to his own home at Ballymacsimon, Glenealy, where Price, writing in 1959, noted it was still located. By December 1930, Ó Dubhghaill was writing again in more urgent terms. Murphy had smashed several of the stones, one for road-making, others for railway macadam, and at least one further stone, described as resembling a chair, had been broken up before Ó Dubhghaill could intervene. The same field also contained, according to his letters, the remains of a cromlech, a type of megalithic tomb formed by large upright stones capped with a horizontal slab, and a substantial fort with a paved approach road and original fencing still partly visible. Neither the cromlech nor the fort appeared on the Ordnance Survey map of the time. Murphy eventually promised to stop the destruction, though by then several irreplaceable stones had already gone into the foundations of a cow-house and the surface of a railway.