Their exact purpose is debated, but they are generally associated with early ecclesiastical activity, sometimes linked to grinding or ritual use, and they have a tendency to outlast almost everything else around them. Here, it sits quietly at the edge of things, easy to miss.

The site at Ballinclare preserves the parish church of Toome, set on a broad, low east-west ridge. The graveyard surrounding it is roughly subrectangular, measuring approximately 55 metres east to west and 35 metres north to south, and is defined by an earthen bank with an external stone facing. That boundary is itself significant: the whole arrangement sits within a wider ecclesiastical enclosure, a type of defined sacred precinct commonly associated with early medieval monastic or church settlements in Ireland. These enclosures, often curvilinear or roughly rectilinear in plan, reflect the organised religious landscape of early Christian Ireland, where the boundary between sacred and secular space was physically marked out. The layering here is considerable: an enclosure containing a graveyard containing a church, with the bullaun stone sitting just outside the nave as though it pre-dates, or at least stands apart from, the more formal architecture around it.