It looks, at first glance, like a casual feature of the churchyard, easy to walk past. It is, in fact, a bullaun stone, one of a pair on the site, and it carries the kind of quiet displacement that makes these objects genuinely interesting: it almost certainly did not begin its life here.

Bullaun stones are among the more enigmatic survivals of early Irish Christianity. The term refers to any stone, usually associated with an early ecclesiastical site or holy well, that bears one or more bowl-shaped depressions, ground or worn into the surface. Their precise function is debated, but they are widely thought to have been used for ritual purposes, possibly grinding or mixing, and in many cases became associated with cursing rites or healing traditions long after their original context was forgotten. This particular example is an irregular sandstone block, roughly 0.75 metres by 0.5 metres, standing about 0.4 metres high, with a central hollow some 0.34 metres across and 0.25 metres deep. Writing in 1898, a scholar named Murphy recorded that the stone had originally stood near St Lachtaín's holy well in the neighbouring townland of Cloheena, before being moved to the church grounds. The well and the stone, in other words, once formed part of the same sacred landscape, a pairing common to early Irish religious sites, where water and worked stone frequently appear together. Its relocation, at some point before the end of the nineteenth century, severed that connection, leaving the stone in its current, slightly orphaned setting beside the church.