Bullaun stone, Lawlesstown, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Holy Sites & Wells
Between the sacred and the mundane, a large limestone outcrop sits inside a factory car park roughly a kilometre north of Clonmel, its surface pocked with a series of circular depressions that have been gathering water, and perhaps offerings, for centuries.
This is a bullaun stone, a type of boulder or rock face bearing one or more deliberate cup-shaped hollows that are found across Ireland and are most often associated with early Christian sites and folk ritual. What makes the Lawlesstown example quietly remarkable is not just its setting but its biography: the Ordnance Survey's 1906 edition of the six-inch map records this same stone as a Holy Well, a classification suggesting that local people once attached devotional significance to the water that collects in its main depression.
The outcrop itself is triangular in plan, its three sides measuring roughly three metres, two point nine metres, and two point two metres respectively, rising to a maximum height of about seventy centimetres. The rock is natural limestone, marked by fissures that are geological rather than worked, and the largest of its hollows sits at the elevated southern corner, a circular depression around thirty centimetres across and half a metre deep, which holds water. Adjacent to it, near the highest point of the stone, is a smaller hollow. Along the gently sloping northern face, four further depressions are arranged in a rough east-west alignment, decreasing in size as they go, the smallest barely six centimetres in diameter. Whether these were all carved at the same period, or accumulated over time as the stone accrued successive layers of use, is not recorded. Today the outcrop has been incorporated into a small landscaped area enclosed by a low modern stone wall, an arrangement that acknowledges its presence without quite explaining it to anyone who happens to pull into the car park beside it.