Bullaun stone (present location), Gurteenroe By., Co. Cork

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Holy Sites & Wells

Bullaun stone (present location), Gurteenroe By., Co. Cork

In a domestic garden in Gurteenroe townland, County Cork, two ancient stones sit together that were never originally neighbours.

Bullaun stones are boulders or slabs into which one or more shallow, rounded depressions have been deliberately ground, most likely during the early medieval period in Ireland. The bowls were used for grinding or crushing, and many bullaun stones later acquired associations with holy wells and patterns, their hollows said to hold water with curative properties. These two, however, arrived at their current resting place by entirely practical modern routes, their sacred or functional pasts subordinated to the rhythms of contemporary farming and construction.

The first stone came to light during the building of a cattle shed on an adjacent property; the second was unearthed a few fields to the west in the course of land reclamation work. Despite their separate discoveries, the two are strikingly similar. Both are roughly the same thickness, around fifteen centimetres, and both carry elongated oval bowls, a relatively distinctive profile. The first stone is the larger of the two, measuring approximately sixty centimetres north to south and thirty-three centimetres east to west, with an oval bowl some forty-four centimetres long, twenty-six centimetres wide, and six centimetres deep. The second is slightly more compact and sub-rectangular in outline, measuring around fifty-three centimetres by forty centimetres, with a shallower bowl of thirty-six centimetres by twenty centimetres and roughly five centimetres in depth. Whether the two once stood in proximity to one another before being separated by centuries of agricultural activity is impossible to say, but the resemblance between them is close enough to invite the question.

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