Bullaun stone, Aghadoe, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Holy Sites & Wells
At the highest point of Glenbower Wood in County Cork, a stone sits on a rock outcrop with a hollow worn into its surface that has no easy explanation and no entry on either of the two Ordnance Survey maps that recorded this landscape in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The absence from both the 1842 and 1902 six-inch surveys does not mean the stone is recent; it may simply mean no surveyor noted it, which is not unusual for this class of object.
Bullaun stones are boulders or outcrops bearing one or more cup-shaped depressions, ground or worn into the rock, and they appear across Ireland in association with early ecclesiastical sites, holy wells, and ancient routeways, though their precise function remains debated. This example is an irregular stone with a central circular hollow roughly 0.4 metres across and 0.2 metres deep. Beside it sits a second stone, subrectangular in form, with a smaller rectangular socket measuring approximately 0.2 metres long, 0.1 metres wide, and 0.15 metres deep, positioned off-centre. That second socket, rectangular rather than the more typical rounded cup, is an unusual detail; rectangular cuttings of this kind are sometimes associated with the seating of a post or cross-shaft, though whether that is the case here is not recorded. The two stones together, sitting at the wooded summit of Glenbower, give the site a quiet specificity that a single bullaun would lack.