Doughnambraher Font, Killian, Co. Clare

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Holy Sites & Wells

Doughnambraher Font, Killian, Co. Clare

Inside a quiet ecclesiastical enclosure near Killian in County Clare sits a diamond-shaped slab of Old Red Sandstone that carries two stone basins and, resting inside the larger of them, seven smooth water-rolled stones.

Those stones are the detail that sets this place apart. They are described in the record as cursing stones, a category of object found at various early Christian and pre-Christian sites across Ireland, where they were traditionally turned or handled as part of ritual invocations, sometimes for protection, sometimes to bring harm upon an enemy. The larger basin measures roughly half a metre across and reaches a depth of seventeen centimetres, deep enough to hold water, and the stones inside it show the kind of rounding that comes from long movement in a river or stream rather than anything done to them on site.

The slab appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1840 and 1920 under the name Doughnambraher Font, suggesting it had been formally recognised as a site of significance for at least a century before either of those surveys committed it to paper. Locally, though, it has long gone by a different name entirely: Jack Baker's well, as recorded by Lenihan in 1994. That doubling of names, one cartographic and formal, the other rooted in local memory and attached to a specific person, is fairly typical of sites like this across the west of Ireland, where official nomenclature and community knowledge often run in parallel without quite converging. The enclosure within which the font sits is itself a separate recorded monument, and the font occupies its south-south-western perimeter, positioned as though marking a threshold or boundary rather than a centre.

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