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

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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 meant to be neighbours.

Both are bullaun stones, a type of early medieval carved stone bearing one or more deliberately hollowed depressions, usually oval or circular in form, whose precise purpose remains debated. They may have served as grinding or pounding vessels, or held water for ritual use, or both at different times in their long lives. What makes this particular pair quietly odd is the fact that they arrived at their current resting place from entirely separate locations, brought together by the kind of agricultural accident that rescues things from permanent loss.

The first stone turned up when a cattle shed was being built adjacent to the garden; the second was recovered a few fields to the west during land reclamation work. Despite these different origins, the two share a strikingly similar character. Both are relatively modest in scale and both carry elongated, oval bowls ground into their upper surfaces. The eastern stone measures roughly 0.6 metres north to south and 0.33 metres east to west, with a bowl approximately 0.44 metres long and 0.06 metres deep. The second, slightly more compact and sub-rectangular in outline, measures around 0.53 metres by 0.4 metres, with its bowl reaching about 0.36 metres in length and 0.05 metres in depth. The similarity in profile between stones found separately, in different fields, raises the possibility that they once belonged to the same site or tradition, scattered over time by centuries of farming and ground disturbance.

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