Outside the doorway of a Romanesque parish church in Coolfinn, two bullaun stones sit where they have presumably sat for centuries, easy to overlook and difficult to date. Bullauns are boulders or slabs into which one or more bowl-shaped depressions have been ground or pecked, and they appear at early ecclesiastical sites across Ireland with enough regularity to suggest ritual significance, though what that significance was remains debated. The water that collects in them was long regarded as curative or holy, and many bullauns are still associated with patterns and local devotion.

The church they accompany, the parish church of Guilcagh, occupies a small rectangular graveyard on the edge of the River Suir floodplain, with the Kilbunny Stream running roughly west to east some thirty to forty metres to the south-east. The Romanesque style of the church places its origins in the early medieval period, when that architectural tradition, characterised by rounded arches and decorative stonework, was being adopted and adapted by Irish ecclesiastical builders. The northern of the two bullauns is an oval shale stone measuring approximately 0.85 metres by 0.6 metres, standing about 0.35 metres high, with a single basin ground into its surface measuring 0.45 metres by 0.35 metres and roughly 0.1 metres deep. It is a modest object by any measure, neither large nor visually dramatic, which may explain why such stones so often go unnoticed by people passing through the gates of old churchyards.