Bullauns are boulders or flat stones with one or more bowl-shaped depressions ground into their surface, and they turn up across Ireland in contexts ranging from early Christian settlements to prehistoric enclosures, their exact purpose still debated. Finding one here, inside a rath in pastureland at Ellagh More, is the kind of detail that makes an otherwise modest earthwork worth pausing over.

The rath itself occupies a gentle rise where a stream bends close to its southern edge before looping around to the west and north, a positioning that would have made practical sense to whoever built and used it. Ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, were typically sited with an eye to drainage, visibility, and access to water. This one is roughly circular, about twenty metres across, defined by a sloping bank or scarp that stands around one and a half metres high on the south side. In places the scarp retains a slightly raised inner lip, and its top is noticeably stony, some of which likely reflects generations of farmers piling field clearance stones onto an already prominent feature. The probable entrance, where the enclosing bank dips lowest, faces east, towards a natural low rise in the ground that functions almost like a causeway leading up to it. The interior is level apart from a shallow hollow of about four metres across in the south-east quadrant, near where the bullaun stone rests.

The site today is partly smothered in ferns and overgrowth, with several conifer trees planted inside the enclosure at some point, lending it an accidental, half-forgotten quality. Clearance boulders are scattered along the eastern and south-eastern edge of the interior, evidence of the working farmland that surrounds it and that has shaped what visitors now see as much as any ancient hand.