Such stones are found across Ireland, often near ecclesiastical sites, and their original purpose remains genuinely uncertain, though suggestions range from grain-grinding to ritual use. That this one sits openly among the headstones, partially obscured by overgrowth, gives the place a quietly layered quality: a pre-Christian or early Christian object absorbed into a post-Reformation burial ground, with centuries of use accumulated around it.

The graveyard, roughly rectangular and measuring approximately sixty metres east to west and fifty metres north to south, is enclosed by an earthen fence that curves noticeably outward along its western side. It was the burial ground of the ancient parish of Templesque, whose church once stood in the north-western quadrant of the enclosure. By 1615, that church was already recorded as being in ruins, according to Brady's nineteenth-century account of Irish ecclesiastical history. The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map still marks the structure as a ruin; by the 1904 edition, it had been reduced to a "site of", and today only a slight rise in the ground indicates where it once stood. The earliest inscribed headstones date from the 1780s, and two chest tombs, the raised box-like grave markers common in Irish churchyards of the period, carry dates of 1727 and 1818.

The graveyard is approached by a laneway from the south and, despite being partially overgrown, it is still occasionally used for burial, which gives it a different character from the purely abandoned sites more common across rural Ireland. The bullaun stone stands in the centre of the enclosure and is worth locating deliberately rather than stumbling across, given how easily it can be missed among the longer grass.