It still stands a few yards above the high-water mark on the sea-shore in the Gretna Parish, a lonely granite boulder stone, six feet or so in height, and nine or ten in circumference. It is close to the junction of the "Sark" @ "Kirtle" with the "Esk". Geographically, functionally, and historically it answers at the end of of the14th closely to the characteristics of the "Place called Sulwat at the marches of the realms" a hundred years before.

Hence the belief that this is no chance coincidence, but that in very truth the "Lochmabenstane" mark the Scottish terminus of the great historic ford.
This conclusion if well founded, must add a new interest to that old grey stone.
Dropped from some iceberg in an earlier geological period it lay, when the land emerged from the sea, an unheeded block until the barbaric piety of some ancient race installed it as the presiding stone of an oval group.
"The chief stone of the cluster" as it's original "Celtic" name of Clochmaban" possibly means, or it may mark the grave or be otherwise associated with "Maponus" a heathen deity equated with "Apollo" worshipped in Cumberland and Northumberland during the Roman occupation, or with the memory of "Mabon" that vague Arthurian heroic adumbration.

The character of Solway as a Border meeting point is seen to be maintained in the 14th Century by the return of prisoners being ransomed and a kind of Marmet being held there, a constant characteristic of such assemblies.