ryaner

The tree-line that used to give you your bearings is gone, the trees are down, and there’s an unholy mess to be traversed before you get to the circle. What wonder and joy when you get there though. The circle pulls you in, the views opened up all around. Keadeen is a monster brooding in the clouds to the east. Brusselstown hillfort dominates the north-west.
We had precious little time to drink in the rest of the views: we arrived 5 minutes before a bunch of worshippers took over the circle for their rituals. Were we pissed off? Not half mate!

I heard Christian Corlett mention this stone during a talk he had given on the rock art of South Leinster. Ken Williams had attended the talk and posted the recording on da web. I’ve been curious about the stone for a while, located as it is in the megalithically sparse south central Wicklow mountains. It’s also a place where I spent quite a bit of time as a youngster and it was a great excuse to return to Glenmalure.

I ran a find on cup-marked stones in Wicklow on the archaeology.ie database and sure enough there it was! The placement on the map is bang on though the satellite map is quite a bit older than reality which was confusing at first. Using OS sheet 62, find the first forest track on your left after the sharp right turn coming up the road from Drumgoff. The stone is in the field above the end of this track, a little to the right and about 150 metres away.

There are hut sites and enclosures marked on the archaeology.ie map in the vicinity. These are hard to make out and there’s supposed to be one about 10 metres from this stone. The stone itself is flush with the ground, slab-like, roughly a metre by 500cms. There is one main concentration of cup-marks towards the north-east of the stone. These are placed in more or less a straight line. There are about 10 other cups sacattered around the rock in various states of erosion.

I loved the area, Fananierin mountain to the north-east, the small valley created by it and Slieve Maan to the south-west, Drumgoff brook at its bottom feeding into the Avonbeg. The faint feeling that these cups might be natural solution pits faded as I strolled around in the sunshine, examining the hut-sites and enclosures.

There are 4 bullaun stones in the vicinity of the Moone High Cross Inn that I could find (there may be more), 3 singles and a double. We’d stopped here for a spot of lunch and when I spotted the rough-hewn boulder outside the bar I thought; it couldn’t be – a bullaun stone being used as an ashtray!
On further investigation I encountered the other three around the pub amongst various modern stone circles and follies. I asked the landlady where the bullauns had come from and she said that her husband had dug them out of a wall under the road outside the inn.
These are not on archaeology.ie and I’ve never come across any mention of them elsewhere. Strange.