Bullaun stone, Brockagh, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Holy Sites & Wells
In a field just north of St Kevin's Road in Brockagh, County Wicklow, nine granite boulders sit quietly in the landscape, each one worn with shallow basins hollowed into their surfaces.
These are bullaun stones, a type of ancient carved rock found widely across Ireland, characterised by the cup-like depressions ground into their upper faces. Their precise origins and purposes remain debated, though they are frequently associated with early Christian and pre-Christian ritual activity. What makes this particular grouping unusual is its scale: thirteen basins distributed across nine stones, with four of them clustered together and known locally as the "Seven Fonts", a name that raises its own quiet puzzle given the discrepancy in numbers.
The Brockagh stones sit within a broader sacred landscape shaped by the cult of St Kevin, the sixth-century hermit monk whose presence saturated this corner of the Wicklow Mountains. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks two further features nearby: the site of a thornbush roughly 100 metres to the north-west, and a feature recorded as St Kevin's Keeve, a keeve being an old word for a large tub or vessel, possibly a reference to another hollow stone or water-catching basin associated with the saint. Writing in 1972, Healy described one of the boulders as measuring 1.7 metres by 1.15 metres, with a single basin approximately 46 centimetres across and 13 centimetres deep visible at the top. Whether the other basins were obscured by earth or vegetation at the time of that survey is not recorded, but the fuller count of thirteen suggests the site rewards careful looking.