Holed stone, Ballymore Eustace, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Stone Monuments
At the eastern end of a graveyard in Ballymore Eustace, a small granite block sits with a perfectly circular hole bored through its centre. The stone is modest in every measurable sense, roughly 68 centimetres long, 44 wide, and just 22 centimetres high, with a hole of about 14 centimetres in diameter passing clean through it. That hole is the reason it is recorded at all.
Holed stones appear at various sites across Ireland, and their purposes remain genuinely contested. Some are associated with oath-taking or the sealing of agreements, with hands passed through the opening as a form of binding contract. Others have been linked to healing rituals or to practices surrounding the veneration of the dead. The graveyard setting here adds a particular ambiguity, since it is not always clear whether such stones were placed deliberately in funerary contexts or simply absorbed into them over time as the landscape changed around them. Bradley and colleagues noted the stone's presence in 1986, which remains the principal documentation of it.