In the graveyard at Kilpatrick, County Westmeath, there was once recorded a bullaun stone, one of those weathered boulders bearing one or more cup-shaped hollows ground into their surface, found across Ireland at early ecclesiastical sites and sometimes associated with folk healing or ritual use of water collected in the basin. When a researcher went to find it, it was simply gone.

The stone had been noted in 1981 as sitting 6.5 metres to the south of the old church at Kilpatrick. That single measurement fixes it precisely in relation to the building, which makes its disappearance all the more puzzling. Bullaun stones are not small or easily pocketed objects; they are typically heavy, immovable-looking features of a landscape, which is part of why their presence at a site tends to be taken for granted across centuries. Whether this one was cleared away during graveyard tidying, incorporated into later stonework, or moved for reasons now unrecorded, no trace of it was found when the location was revisited.