Bullaun stone, Cill Ura Thoir, Co. Kerry

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Holy Sites & Wells

Bullaun stone, Cill Ura Thoir, Co. Kerry

Standing upright on the eastern side of the road through Kildurrihy village in County Kerry, this large flat stone carries markings from what appear to be two very different periods of human activity, and nobody is entirely sure what to make of either.

The stone is 2.3 metres wide but only 0.3 to 0.5 metres thick, giving it the quality of a great slab set on edge rather than a standing stone in the conventional sense. On its eastern face sits a roughly circular, almost conical hollow, about 27 to 30 centimetres across and 15 centimetres deep, which may be a bullaun. A bullaun is a deliberate basin-like depression ground into a rock, typically associated in Ireland with early Christian sites and sometimes believed to hold water with curative or ritual significance. The qualification "may be" matters here, because the stone's own history is uncertain.

According to local tradition, the stone once lay flat on the ground beyond a farmhouse on the western side of the road, which raises the possibility that what now appears on its eastern face was originally a surface depression rather than a carved basin set at a meaningful height. If the stone was moved and re-erected at some point, the original orientation and purpose of the hollow would be difficult to reconstruct. Adding further complexity, the western face carries three possible cup-marks, shallow circular depressions of a kind associated with prehistoric stone carving, as well as four incised crosses. The crosses, however, were apparently made within living memory, according to local information gathered at the time of the Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey published by J. Cuppage in 1986. That layering of the genuinely ancient, the ambiguous, and the comparatively recent, all on a single stone of uncertain provenance, makes it an oddly compressed record of the impulse to mark stone with meaning across very different eras.

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