Bullaun stone, Kippure, Co. Wicklow

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Holy Sites & Wells

Bullaun stone, Kippure, Co. Wicklow

In rough boggy ground beside the River Liffey, not far from its source on the slopes of Kippure, sits a small granite boulder that draws attention less for its size than for what has been worked into it.

To one side of the stone is a circular, bowl-shaped hollow, roughly twenty centimetres across and seventeen deep, with sides worn conspicuously smooth. This is a bullaun, a term used for artificial cup-shaped depressions ground into rock, typically associated in Ireland with early Christian sites, holy wells, and places of localised devotion, though their origins and purposes remain genuinely uncertain.

The stone itself is compact, measuring just under half a metre in length and little more than a third of a metre high, cut from fine-grained granite consistent with the geology of the surrounding Wicklow uplands. It is not in its original position, though it is considered unlikely to have travelled far from wherever it first stood. That small caveat matters more than it might seem: bullauns are often found in association with ecclesiastical enclosures or ancient routeways, and knowing a stone has shifted only slightly still leaves open the question of what once surrounded it here, in this stretch of blanket bog where the Liffey is little more than a moorland stream.

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