Bullaun stone, Brockagh, Co. Wicklow

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Holy Sites & Wells

Bullaun stone, Brockagh, Co. Wicklow

In a field north of St Kevin's Road in Brockagh, County Wicklow, nine granite boulders sit quietly in the landscape, their surfaces worn into thirteen shallow basins by a process that archaeologists still debate.

These are bullaun stones, boulders into which one or more cup-shaped depressions have been deliberately ground, and they appear across Ireland in association with early ecclesiastical sites, holy wells, and ancient routeways. What makes this particular group unusual is the sheer number of stones gathered in one place, and the fact that four of them have acquired a collective name: the Seven Fonts, a designation that hints at some long-standing local understanding of the water that would have pooled in their basins.

The site sits close to St Kevin's Road, the old pilgrimage route that crosses the Wicklow Mountains towards Glendalough, which adds a layer of significance to its location. Writing in 1972, Healy recorded one of the boulders in detail, noting a single visible basin measuring roughly 42 centimetres by 39 centimetres and nearly 20 centimetres deep, set into a stone approximately 2.3 metres long and 1.5 metres wide. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map places a further point of interest about 100 metres to the north-west, marked as the site of a thornbush associated with St Kevin's Keeve, a keeve being a large tub or vessel, a word sometimes used in Irish ecclesiastical tradition to describe a stone basin connected to a saint's cult. The clustering of these features along a known pilgrimage corridor suggests the area was a meaningful stopping point for travellers making their way through the mountains for centuries.

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