Bullaun stone, Lorrha, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Holy Sites & Wells

Bullaun stone, Lorrha, Co. Tipperary

At the corners of a Roman Catholic church in the north Tipperary village of Lorrha, two ancient stones sit in positions that most visitors walk past without a second glance.

They are bullauns, a type of stone, usually boulder-sized, that carries one or more deliberate cup-shaped hollows ground into its surface. Their exact original purpose remains debated; they may have served as mortars for grinding, as vessels for ritual water, or both at different points in their long use. What makes bullauns consistently interesting is their tendency to outlast every institutional context around them, absorbed quietly into Christian sites after centuries of earlier use.

The stone described here sits at the south-east corner of the east gable of the church, with a companion piece at the north-east corner. This particular bullaun is a roughly subcircular block of conglomerate, measuring approximately 0.83 metres by 0.63 metres and standing about half a metre high. Its hollow is set slightly off-centre, a sub-oval depression roughly 0.3 metres across and 0.17 metres deep. One side of the stone has a split face that has left a notably straight edge, an accident of geology that gives the otherwise rounded block an unexpectedly geometric quality. The church stands adjacent to the Dominican Friary at the south-western end of the village, a site with its own layered medieval history, which makes the presence of these pre-medieval stones at its margins feel less like coincidence and more like continuity.

Both bullauns are positioned at the corners of the church's east gable, so they are visible from outside the building without any need to enter. The straight-edged split face is a useful detail to look for when trying to distinguish this stone from its companion.

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