Saint Patrick's Stone, Grange More, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Holy Sites & Wells
At a T-junction in Grange More, County Tipperary, traffic splits around a low concrete island, and sitting at its centre, painted green, is a lump of limestone that locals have long associated with Saint Patrick's knees.
The stone is not displayed in a church or a heritage centre; it simply sits in the road, ringed by small stones set into cement kerbing, as ordinary and extraordinary a piece of roadside archaeology as you are likely to encounter.
The boulder is a bullaun stone, a type of ancient stone, usually found near early ecclesiastical sites, that bears one or more rounded depressions hollowed into its surface, either by human hand or by natural weathering, and often associated in folk tradition with saints or curative ritual. This example is an irregular limestone boulder, roughly half a metre across, with two roughly circular depressions: the larger measures around 0.19 metres by 0.2 metres and is about 0.1 metres deep, while the smaller is slightly narrower and shallower. According to a source cited by Power in 1908, the stone is limestone, and the tradition attached to it holds that Saint Patrick knelt here, pressing his knees into the rock and leaving the two hollows as a permanent imprint. Whether the depressions are natural or worked, the story gave the stone a sacred character that has kept it, improbably, at the centre of a functioning road junction rather than lost in a field or carted off as rubble. The green paint is a more recent addition, its symbolism perhaps obvious, though it does give the boulder a slightly surreal quality against the tarmac surrounding it.