Somewhere along the southern bank of a small stream in Clane, a limestone slab sits cemented to the top of a retaining wall, doing an unglamorous job of holding back earth and water. It would be easy to pass it without a second glance, were it not for the deep circular hollow worn into its surface, roughly thirty centimetres across and just as deep. This is a bullaun stone, a type of object found at early Christian and pre-Christian sites across Ireland, characterised by one or more bowl-shaped depressions ground or worn into the rock. Their precise original function remains debated; suggestions range from liturgical use to grain grinding to the gathering of rainwater believed to have curative properties. Whatever its original purpose, this one has ended up repurposed as building material, which is an unremarkable fate for such stones but a small loss of context nonetheless.

The stone is a roughly dressed rectangular slab, and its current position is around 120 metres to the south of an early monastic site at Clane. The monastery at Clane was a significant ecclesiastical settlement, and the proximity of the bullaun to that site is almost certainly not coincidental. Such stones are frequently found in association with early medieval religious foundations, occasionally still in situ within or near the original enclosure, though this one has clearly been moved at some point before being fixed into the wall where it now rests. The reference in Bradley and colleagues' 1986 survey records it in its present location, so it had already been incorporated into the wall structure by that date.