At Killea graveyard in County Tipperary, a bullaun stone was uncovered during a clean-up scheme in the late 1990s, examined, recorded, and then apparently lost to view again. Its present location has not been identified, which gives the object a quietly puzzling afterlife: documented but unlocatable, somewhere in or around the site where it was found.

Bullaun stones are boulders or slabs with one or more cup-shaped hollows ground into their surface. They appear across Ireland in early medieval ecclesiastical contexts, and are thought to have served various functions, from grinding to ritual use, though their precise purposes are debated. This particular example, modest in scale at roughly 35 by 59 centimetres with a central hollow 30 centimetres across, turned up near the north-east boundary wall of the graveyard during a FÁS-organised clearance project. It was not alone in the find. The same scheme brought to light two quern stones, used for hand-grinding grain, along with architectural fragments from the medieval church on the site, including the carved heads of a single-light window and a twin-light window, both with ogee-shaped arched heads, a decorative form associated with later medieval Irish ecclesiastical building. The fragments suggest that whatever stood at Killea was once a reasonably well-appointed structure, even if very little of it survives above ground today.

The bullaun's disappearance after discovery is a reminder of how easily small, unassuming objects slip out of the record. It may have been moved during the clean-up, incorporated into a wall, or simply set aside somewhere on the grounds and forgotten. Anyone visiting Killea graveyard might keep an eye out for a flat or rounded stone with a distinct circular hollow worn into its face, tucked against a boundary wall or half-buried at the field's edge.