A granite slab and its stories
Be honest with yourself before you come: this is a five-minute stop, not a spectacle. The Aghade Holed Stone is a leaning granite slab in a field about 3.5 km south of Tullow in County Carlow, and one visitor’s verdict – ‘not the most visually stunning site, but one of the most unusual for its history and folklore’ – is exactly right. You come for the story, not the view.
The stone is known locally as Cloch an Phoill, ‘the stone of the hole’. The granite slab stands roughly 2.4m tall, 1.6m wide and up to 0.46m thick, weighs close to five tonnes, and is pierced near the top by a round hole about 30cm across. It leans at an angle now and is propped to hold it steady. The information plaque dates it to the early Bronze Age, around 2000–1600 BC; archaeologists suspect the holed slab was originally the porthole stone that closed the chamber of a megalithic tomb, the hole left so the living could pass food and offerings through to the dead.
The cure and the legend
Two stories make the stone worth the detour. The first is medicine. Into the early 1800s, sick children were passed through the hole as a folk cure for rickets – a practice already dying out when John Ryan recorded it in his 1813 history of Carlow, and gone entirely well over a century ago. There is a grim neatness to it: rickets was a real scourge of the prehistoric people who may have raised the stone in the first place.
The second is older and bloodier. The 14th-century Book of Ballymote tells how Niall of the Nine Hostages, the High King, took Eochaid – son of a fifth-century King of Leinster – as a hostage and had him chained to this stone, the chain run through the hole, with nine champions sent to kill him. Eochaid broke the chain and killed all nine. The ford here, Áth Fhádhad, gives the townland of Aghade its name; tradition also makes it the spot where the early Christian missionary Iserninus, a contemporary of St Patrick, founded a church in the fifth century.
Visiting
The stone is an unguided National Monument in state care, free and open at any time, year-round. It is well signposted off the N81 south of Tullow: look for the small lay-by and the turnstile in the hedge just north of a large gateway, which lets you into the field. There is room for only a couple of cars. There are no toilets, no shelter and nothing on site beyond the marker; the nearest cafés and toilets are back in Tullow. The ground is rough and gets slippery after rain, so mind your footing, and treat the propped stone with care.
Nearby
Tullow, a few minutes north, is the obvious place for food and a break. For more megaliths, Brownshill Dolmen near Carlow town has a granite capstone of over 100 tonnes, reckoned the heaviest in Europe. Huntington Castle at Clonegal and the Nine Stones viewpoint on the Blackstairs, with one of the best views in the southeast, round out a day in this corner of Carlow.