A modest stone, roughly half a metre long and not much wider than a dinner plate, came to light not through any planned excavation but because somebody needed to build a lane. When a north-south track was cut through the old ecclesiastical enclosure associated with the church of St Dimóg, or St Dima, in the Dawn river valley of County Waterford, the blade met something older. What emerged was a bullaun stone, a type of ancient stone, typically associated with early Christian or pre-Christian sites, that has been deliberately hollowed to form one or more circular basins. Their purpose is still debated, ranging from liturgical use to grain grinding to the collection of water believed to have curative properties. This particular example is small but precise: a single basin, 23 centimetres across and 8 centimetres deep, worn into a stone measuring roughly 50 by 30 centimetres.

The site sits on a shelf of ground on the northern side of the west-to-east Dawn river valley, with the stream running about 100 metres to the south. The church here was noted by O'Flanagan in 1929 and the enclosure around it recorded by Power in 1952, both recognising that this quiet pastoral spot had once formed part of an organised early ecclesiastical landscape dedicated to a saint whose name survives in the placename Kilmoyemoge. The cutting of the lane, routine and practical as it was, effectively dismantled part of that enclosure and displaced the bullaun stone in the process. It now sits at a house nearby, removed from the ground that held it, a small object carrying a great deal of unresolved context.