Bullaun stone, Carrigathou, Co. Cork

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Holy Sites & Wells

Bullaun stone, Carrigathou, Co. Cork

In the ruins of a church at Carrigathou, Co. Cork, there is a stone that nobody can currently find.

It is a bullaun, a type of ancient carved boulder with one or more cup-shaped hollows ground into its upper surface, and its particular hollow was once believed to cure warts. That the stone itself has since disappeared beneath a spread of field-clearance debris only adds to the atmosphere of quiet neglect that surrounds these objects, which occupied an odd space between the ecclesiastical and the folk-magical for centuries.

When P. J. Hartnett recorded the stone in 1947, it measured roughly 24 inches by 48 inches, with a hemispherical hollow about 16 inches in diameter and 4 inches deep scooped into its face. The water that pooled there was, according to local belief at the time, effective against warts. That kind of attributed virtue was common to bullauns across Ireland, where the rainwater collecting in the hollow was thought to carry some curative or even cursing power depending on how it was used or invoked. The stone sat within the remains of a church, and while it does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1842 or 1904, it was recorded on the 1938 edition of the same series, suggesting either that it was newly noticed or that it had shifted in and out of visibility even then.

The site today is largely buried. Field-clearance stones, the accumulated debris of generations of agricultural tidying, cover the area, and the bullaun is not visible above ground. It has not vanished in any dramatic sense; it is simply submerged beneath the ordinary work of the landscape.

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