Bullaun stone, Kilcaskan, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Holy Sites & Wells
On the south side of a road near Kilcaskan graveyard in West Cork, a large triangular sandstone boulder sits quietly in the landscape.
It measures roughly 1.85 by 2 metres, and ground into its upper surface is a circular hollow about 40 centimetres across and 23 centimetres deep. That hollow is the whole point. The stone is a bullaun, a type of ancient carved rock found throughout Ireland, typically associated with early Christian or pre-Christian sacred sites, in which the basin-like depression was used to collect rainwater believed to carry curative or spiritual properties. This one was known as Toberatemple, meaning "well of the church", a name that signals its place within a living tradition of localised devotion.
Writing in 1863, Brady recorded what people were actually doing at this stone. Those suffering from sore eyes would bathe them in the water collected in the hollow, and at each circuit of the stone they would place into it a small cross fashioned from a rush. Afterwards they would tie a piece of rag to a nearby bush above the stone, a practice recognisable from holy well traditions across Ireland, where strips of cloth left at the site are understood to carry away the ailment or mark a completed act of devotion. The name Toberatemple, noted by O'Donoghue in 1986, draws the stone into the same conceptual territory as a holy well, even though the water source here is the cupped stone itself rather than a spring or stream. That conflation of bullaun and well is not unusual; in many parts of Ireland the two were understood as functionally and spiritually equivalent.
The stone sits to the east of the graveyard, on the south side of the road, and remains accessible to anyone passing through the area. The rush crosses and the rag bush described by Brady are the kind of detail worth looking for, since devotional practices at sites like this sometimes continue quietly long after they drop out of the written record.