A bullaun stone is, in essence, a rock with a deliberate hollow ground or pecked into its surface, a basin that accumulated rainwater and was long associated with healing, cursing, and devotional practice across early Christian and pre-Christian Ireland. What makes the example from Reatagh, County Waterford, quietly curious is where it once sat: not beside a church, not in a graveyard, but at a fork in a laneway on a steep north-west-facing slope, the kind of liminal spot where paths diverge and where people have always paused, made decisions, or felt the need to mark the moment with something older than words.

The stone itself is D-shaped and made of conglomerate, a sedimentary rock composed of rounded fragments cemented together, which gives it a rougher, more composite texture than the smoother sandstones or limestones more commonly associated with bullauns. It measures roughly 0.8 metres by 0.5 metres, with a maximum thickness of 0.35 metres, and carries a single oval basin approximately 0.26 metres across and 0.9 metres deep. Modest in scale, then, but carefully worked. At some point it was removed from its original position at that rural laneway junction and is now kept at Carrick-on-Suir, a market town on the River Suir a few kilometres to the north, where it has presumably been placed in some form of protective custody rather than left to weather further on a hillside.