Bullaun stone, Ré Na Ndoirí, Co. Cork

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Holy Sites & Wells

Bullaun stone, Ré Na Ndoirí, Co. Cork

In the grounds of Reananeree Roman Catholic church in mid-Cork, a large irregular stone sits with a single circular hollow worn into its flat upper surface, slightly off-centre, about thirty centimetres across and fifteen deep.

This is a bullaun stone, a type of ancient carved or naturally hollowed rock found across Ireland and generally associated with early Christian and pre-Christian sacred sites. The hollow, smoothed by centuries of use, is the point of the thing: water collects there, and the stones were long regarded as having curative or ritual significance. What makes this particular example quietly anomalous is that it no longer sits where it began.

According to Murphy, writing in 1898, the stone was moved to its current churchyard location from the site of St Lachtaín's church in the neighbouring townland of Cloheena, where the remains of a possible early ecclesiastical site have also been identified. The stone at Reananeree is one of two bullauns recorded in the church grounds, and its dimensions, roughly 1.15 metres by 0.8 metres and 0.15 metres in height, make it a substantial piece. Its relocation, presumably sometime before Murphy documented it, follows a pattern seen elsewhere in Ireland, where objects associated with older sacred sites were absorbed into later Catholic settings rather than abandoned. The original church of St Lachtaín at Cloheena would have represented an early medieval foundation, and the movement of the bullaun into a functioning parish churchyard suggests it retained some local significance long after the older site fell out of use.

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