Somewhere along a quiet laneway in Ballykinsella, a roughly one-metre spherical boulder once sat at the bottom of a north-west-facing slope, doing the quiet work that certain stones in Ireland have always done. It was a resting place for coffins, a waymarker on the road of the dead, and, in the telling of those who lived nearby, a projectile hurled across the landscape by a giant. The stone is now missing, which gives it a particular kind of presence; an absence with a biography.

The boulder was known locally as Conan's Stone, and tradition held that it had been thrown from Carriglong passage tomb, a megalithic monument of the type built during the Neolithic period, in which a burial chamber is approached by a stone-lined corridor, typically sealed beneath a cairn. Carriglong sits some distance to the north-west, and the implied trajectory of the giant's throw carries the eye across a stretch of County Waterford countryside that has been layered with human meaning for thousands of years. The stone's funerary role was more recent and more practical. Coffin rests were a common feature of Irish rural life, placed at intervals along routes to churches or graveyards so that bearers could set down their load and take a moment's pause. In this case the destination was Drumcannon church, roughly 450 metres to the south-east. F. Heylin, writing in the journal Decies in 1978, recorded both the giant legend and the coffin-rest tradition, preserving details that might otherwise have gone unwritten.

The stone's disappearance means there is nothing physical to visit, only a location, a junction of laneways in Ballykinsella, where two local traditions once converged on a single boulder. What remains is the shape of the story: a prehistoric monument, a thrown stone, a line of mourners pausing on a country road, and now a gap in the ground where something heavy used to be.