Bullaun stone, Carrigagown, Co. Tipperary

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Holy Sites & Wells

Bullaun stone, Carrigagown, Co. Tipperary

Some monuments disappear through neglect or the slow work of weather.

This one vanished more abruptly, rolled into a field fence by a farmer during land reclamation work in the 1950s. The stone in question was a granite boulder bearing what appeared to be a bullaun, a shallow circular hollow ground or worn into the surface of a rock, features found at early Christian and prehistoric sites across Ireland and associated with everything from grain grinding to ritual use of water. By the time anyone thought to look for it properly, it was gone.

The site at Carrigagown sits on a rock outcrop in an area of dense scrub, and it was the reclamation work itself that first drew attention to it, when human bones were uncovered during the digging. A 1957 Office of Public Works report recorded the removal of the granite boulder, noting that a local farmer had dumped it into a nearby field fence. Whether the hollow in its surface was a true bullaun or simply a natural depression was never conclusively established, since the stone could not be located again. The human remains, the scrub-covered outcrop, and the lost boulder together suggest a place that had accumulated significance over a long period, though the specifics of that history are now largely unrecoverable.

For anyone curious enough to visit the area around Carrigagown in North Tipperary, the landscape of dense scrub around the outcrop is much as it was described. The stone itself, however, remains unaccounted for, somewhere in or around a field boundary, if it has not since been shifted again or broken up entirely.

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