It is not a dramatic loss in the conventional sense, no collapsed tower or flooded valley, but the absence itself is telling. A bullaun stone, which is a boulder or slab into which one or more cup-shaped depressions have been ground, often over centuries of use, once sat within a holy well at Gurteenroe. By the time anyone thought to record it formally, it had already acquired the weight of deep time.

In the 1840s, surveyors noted the stone in connection with the nearby holy well, describing it as a trough of great antiquity. It was a modest object in physical terms, a round basin roughly thirty centimetres across and fifteen deep, but its context gave it significance. Local people performed "rounds" there on Good Friday, a practice common at Irish holy wells in which the devotee circuits the well or its associated stones a prescribed number of times, often in prayer or penance. The combination of a bullaun and a holy well points to a site that layered early Christian observance over much older ritual uses of water and stone, a pattern repeated across Ireland. By the time O'Hare documented the site in 2000, the bullaun was no longer present at the well.

Where it went is unrecorded. Bullaun stones were sometimes moved into farmyards, repurposed as water troughs for livestock, or simply shifted during agricultural work, which makes their disappearance from original contexts frustratingly common. The holy well at Gurteenroe remains a separate recorded site, but the stone that once gave a particular shape to Good Friday observance there has left only a description behind.