It would be easy to step over it without a second thought. But the shallow oval basin worn into its surface, roughly forty centimetres across and eleven centimetres deep, marks it out as a bullaun, one of the more quietly enigmatic survivals of early Irish religious practice. Bullauns are stones, sometimes natural and sometimes worked, bearing one or more cup-shaped depressions; they are found at ecclesiastical sites across Ireland, and while their precise function remains debated, they are associated with ritual water-holding, cursing stones, and patterns at holy wells.

This particular bullaun sits within Templenaneeve, one of two early churches on Inchagoill, a small island in Lough Corrib accessible only by boat. The stone measures around eighty centimetres in length and forty centimetres wide, and it is not alone; Killanin and Duignan noted three bullauns on the island in their 1962 survey, making Inchagoill something of an unusual concentration of these objects within a single small ecclesiastical landscape. The island itself was long associated with early Christian monasticism, and the presence of multiple bullauns clustered among its ruins suggests the site held a particular ritual significance that outlasted whatever community once maintained it.