Bullaun stone, Cappaghglass, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Holy Sites & Wells
Some archaeological sites are defined by what survives.
This one is defined by what could not be found. Local information had placed a bullaun stone, a boulder or slab with one or more deliberately hollowed cup-shaped depressions ground into its surface, towards the northern end of a garden wall running north to south at the rear of a house in Cappaghglass, County Cork. When investigators went looking in 2004, the wall had disappeared almost entirely beneath a tangle of ivy, briars, and encroaching coniferous trees. Despite an extensive search, no stone was located.
Bullaun stones are among the more quietly persistent features of the Irish landscape. Their origins and uses are not fully understood, though many are associated with early ecclesiastical sites and some retain folkloric significance well into the modern period, with the water that collects in their hollows occasionally credited with curative properties. The Cappaghglass example, if it exists, may be nothing more than a field stone worn by weather and chance into a suggestive shape, or it may be something older, absorbed over time into the fabric of a garden wall and then swallowed further by vegetation. The county inventory records it as a possible bullaun rather than a confirmed one, a category that is itself a kind of archaeological honesty. What local knowledge preserved in speech, the undergrowth had, by 2004, effectively reclaimed.