Bullaun stone, Collon, Co. Louth
Co. Louth |
Holy Sites & Wells
Only half of this stone survives, and that half was found lying in a field near Collon in County Louth, displaced from wherever it originally stood.
It is a bullaun stone, a type of rounded boulder into which one or more cup-shaped depressions have been ground, almost always by hand. Bullauns are associated across Ireland with early ecclesiastical sites, holy wells, and ancient ritual use, though their precise function remains debated. This particular example measures roughly 0.3 metres in thickness, suggesting an original diameter of around half a metre for the complete stone.
The fragment came to light during field walking in 1982, a systematic method of archaeological survey in which researchers walk across open ground in measured lines, recording whatever the soil surface reveals. Its position, to the east of a recorded earthen mound, hints at a connection to that feature, though the stone itself was almost certainly not resting in its original location. The more likely explanation is that land reclamation work in the adjacent field disturbed it at some earlier point, moving it away from wherever it had originally been placed or had fallen. Half of the object is now simply missing, lost to the same agricultural activity that displaced the rest.