Not dramatically, not with any fanfare, but quietly, in the way that ancient things sometimes do in the Irish countryside. The boulder in question was an earthfast bullaun stone, a type of prehistoric or early medieval rock with one or more deliberately hollowed basins ground into its surface. These basins, whose precise origins and uses remain debated, are found at ecclesiastical sites across Ireland and are often associated with early Christian activity, sometimes later venerated as holy wells in miniature. This particular example, recorded some 80 metres north-east of a church at Ashtown in County Wicklow, had a single circular basin roughly 20 centimetres across and 10 centimetres deep, cut into its upper face.

When archaeologists visited the site in 1989, the stone was present and noted. When they returned in 2012, it was gone. No record explains the gap. The working assumption is that the stone did not originate where it was found beside the church, but had most likely been moved at some earlier point from within the ecclesiastical enclosure nearby. Bullaun stones are frequently displaced over centuries, rolled to field margins, incorporated into walls, or shifted during land clearance, which makes tracing their original context difficult. Whether this one was moved again between those two inspections, buried, or simply overlooked on the second visit, is not known.