The Rolls of Butter
The reason to find your way to Teampall Feaghna is a rock. Just beyond the graveyard wall sits an earthfast bullaun stone the locals call the Rolls of Butter, or the Petrified Dairy: seven or eight shallow basins ground into its surface, each cradling a smooth oval pebble that fits it exactly, with rainwater pooling around them. The Schools’ Folklore Collection recorded it as a dairy turned to stone, the basins its milk coolers – keelers – and the pebbles its pats of butter.
The story goes that Saint Fiachna caught a woman stealing her neighbour’s milk and churning butter with it on May morning. He turned her butter to stone, and when she ran, chased her across the river and petrified her too, into an upright standing stone; another version has her selling the stolen butter at Dunmanway market. The stone still earns its keep as a wart cure – walk anticlockwise around it seven times, say a prayer at each basin, dip a finger in the water and dab the wart. It sits on private land, so you view it from a wooden platform built against the outer wall.
The church and graveyard
Teampall Feaghna stands in the townland of Garranes, in the parish of Bonane, under a huge beech tree. What survives of the old church is a fragment: the north half of the east gable and a six-foot run of the north wall, three-foot-thick blocks of green stone set in lime-and-sand mortar. By the time John O’Donovan surveyed it for the Ordnance Survey in the 1830s the old church was already a ruin, so what stands is genuinely medieval, not a later chapel.
The graveyard, Drom Feaghna, is ringed by two walls. The inner circular one is medieval; the outer rectangular wall was thrown up as famine relief in the 1840s. The strip of unconsecrated ground between them was used as a cillín, where unbaptised infants were buried under small stone cairns – a quiet, hard corner of the site worth a moment.
The working parish church, also St Fiachna’s, is a separate building down on the N71 in Bonane village. It was completed in 1892 on the site of an earlier mid-century church, itself raised to replace an 1839 ‘confined, unsafe cabin’. It was designed by Daniel O’Connell, grandson of the Liberator, built by Daniel Foley of Sneem from stone hauled by local farmers, and blessed on 18 May 1892 by Fr John Mangan, later Bishop of Kerry.
The holy well and the Mass rock
Across the road a small holy well, Tobar Fiacna, sits under a shelter of large boulders, its water long used against rheumatism. A flat stone above it carries a cross worn into the surface by generations of pilgrims scratching the sign with a pebble. The well, the cross, the bullaun and a nearby holly tree – the Blessed Bush – were once rounded together as a pattern in Saint Fiachna’s honour.
A short walk north is the Mass rock at Inse an tSagairt, where priests said Mass in secret during the penal years. Local tradition remembers a killing here in 1829, when a priest was set upon by six men, beheaded, and his head carried to Cork. The rock is still treated with reverence. The wider Bonane valley is thick with older monuments again – wedge tombs, standing stones, stone circles – many of them gathered on the Bonane Heritage Park trail.
Getting there
The graveyard is at Garranes, about 2.5 km off the N71 between Kenmare and Glengarriff, at the start of the Priest’s Leap – a narrow, steep old road you do not want to tackle by accident. There is a pull-in beside the graveyard with room for a few cars; come early on a summer’s day and you will have it to yourself. Bus Éireann’s route 270 passes through Bonane but does not stop, and the TFI Local Link service runs only weekly and must be booked ahead, so in practice you arrive by car.
The site is open all year with nothing to pay. Uneven foundations and grass underfoot mean it is not wheelchair-friendly, though the viewing platform for the bullaun is reached on the level.
Mass and contact
Saturday evening Mass at the N71 parish church is at 7.30pm, though times drift, so check locally before setting out. The parish sits in the Kenmare Pastoral Area of the Diocese of Kerry (parish office 027-63045, kenmare@dioceseofkerry.ie). The church interior is small; if you are going for Mass, arrive ten minutes early for a seat.
Treat the ground gently: it is a burial place. Don’t lift the pebbles from the bullaun or the stones from the well, and keep to the worn paths so the old masonry survives the next visitor.