This morning I went to a graveyard with two of my kids. It’s only half a mile from my house. You can see it from my front window, sitting ensconced at the base of Killerry mountain like a navel in the drumlin landscape. The specific reason for visiting was my stumbling upon David Keohan’s work on the tradition of stone-lifting in ancient Ireland. I’ll return to this thread below, but I must first mention a different thread relating to the graveyard.
I first came here last year shortly after I sprained my ankle badly while running, my ankle immobilised in what I named the ‘space-boot’. A wizened elder saw me hobbling around our local shop and approached me to ask, “Have you been to the graveyard for the cure?” In Ireland we have a folk tradition of ‘the cure’ for most ailments. These cures are typically performed by individuals in possession of the gift by virtue of inheritance, or they exist in the landscape within a sacred site like a well, spring or stone and can be accessed through ritual. This man elaborated that some curing stones were to be found on the site of an ancient holy spring in the graveyard and offered a cure for pains of the limbs. These elders, so often disparaged and discarded as irrelevant by our modern culture, are of inestimable value. They are repositories of knowledge and tradition. I had never engaged with a tradition like this before. My younger self would have shunned it as hopelessly naive and deluded. Having begun to tend to my inner reservoir of collective memory, though, I immediately determined to explore this ritual site so close to home.
The curing stones of Killerry
Killerry graveyard is many hundreds of years old and possibly over one thousand, the current iteration having been laid atop the old site which was cleared sometime in the 18th century. The remains of a church are still present in one corner of the graveyard. The earliest recorded mention of this site is from 1346 when a chief of the O’Rourke clan sought shelter in the church here from pursuers, who set the building alight to draw him out to his fateful death.
My instructions were to locate the curing stones in the northeast of the site. There would be an angular stone, upright among them, around which would be wound a thread. I was to remove a length of the thread, replacing it with one I had brought, and tie it in a bracelet around my afflicted limb. I would wear this thread for one day, then remove and burn it. I did as he told me, finding seven worn, oval stones set in a circle atop a weathered flat stone, populated with lichens, themselves generations old.
This is a Christian site, but it is quite possible that the ritual practices at this ancient spring pre-date St. Patrick. Many existing pagan sites were subsumed into the newly spreading religion, forming a wilder Atlantic-fringe folk Christianity. That this was necessary illustrates how deeply connected the population were to the land. That many holy wells still exist here, many with their own local saint, reinforces the point. As I took part in this ritual, I was filled with a sense of rootedness, of a solidity that comes from knowing that people of this place have, for hundreds of years, been coming here and kneeling before these stones to unravel a thread, just like me. A metaphor, perhaps, of the mysticism at the centre of our lives.
To return to the loose thread I left dangling earlier, I came looking for a lifting stone. Keohan, a keen student of the history of strength, has been researching this tradition as it existed in Ireland. Much more is known about this practice in Iceland and Scotland, two places that Ireland shares many cultural elements with thanks to our historical connectedness. In Scotland each glen and clan had their own lifting stone, which constituted a rite of passage for youths to prove themselves. In the Icelandic fishing boats a man’s wage was determined by how heavy a stone he could lift, as the strongest rower would be positioned in the centre of the boat.
Keohan found reference to a lifting stone in a short story by Liam O’Flaherty entitled ‘The Stone’. The story was set on O’Flaherty’s native Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland. He travelled out to the island and found the stone thanks to a clue to the townland it lay in. It was a round lump of pink granite, sitting in a little hollow in the middle of a flat space with the surrounding rocks ‘bruised to a powder’. Since this first find Keohan has discovered 31 more stones in Ireland, evidence of the widespread practice of stone lifting on this island. These stones can weigh over 170kg. There are stones that are named after the only person who could move them, like the Thomas Lonergan stone in Tipperary.
The lifting stone of Inishmore (photo credit David Keohan)
Many are to be found in old graveyards, thus my intrepid mission today. Attempts would likely have been made following a funeral, the ‘funeral games’ of which could last for days in ancient Ireland. The tradition has been largely forgotten today, with the stones often left lying in ditches or covered in moss and bracken, undisturbed for a hundred years, but Keohan relates how, when word spreads of his attempts to lift these lithic weights, the locals come, magnetised, to witness and to test themselves.
It is hard to imagine a more fitting activity to demonstrate how deep the attachment to place resides within us. A stone that means something, a primal movement, not a mutable, temporary object that is subject to redefinition by technology. This is landscape embodied in an act.
I didn’t find any lifting stones today. It is the looking that matters though. As we walked around the graves, my kids (four and six years old) were peppering me with ontological questions. To answer honestly in language they will understand is my constant task as a father. I told them that each grave holds a person who lived here before us. “Are they still alive?”, my daughter asked in wondrous innocence. Yes, I thought, they are. They live on in memory and in the reverence we hold for our shared past.
That’s so interesting Norie. Bodily wisdom indeed.
Fascinating and beautiful, Ryan. Thank you for your pursuit of meaningful connections to our collective past.
My godfather once told me (after i fell one too many times and broke some ribs and bones in my feet at a time i was spending weeks on end in front of a pc) to tie red thread around each ankle. He explained it was like a talisman, but i realized it helped make me more aware of my feet, thus serving as a reminder for me to be more careful...