Irish Druids and Old Irish Religions

Stone- Worship. 2 1
in the seventh century, and as late as 1672, by an ecclesiastical
ordinance, ordering the destruction of circles.
Welshmen were shown the impotence of these objects,
by the power of St.
David splitting the capstone of Maen
Ketti, in Gower.
The Irish, like their neighbours, venerated their lithic
temples. They not only anointed them, as may be still
seen done to the sacred cone in India, but, down to a late
period, they poured water on their sacred surface that
draught might cure their diseases. Molly Grime, a rude
stone figure, kept in Glentham church, was annually
washed with water from Newell well ; so was the wooden
image of St. Fumac washed in water from a holy well
near Keith. Babies were sprinkled at cairns in Western
or South Scotland down to the seventeenth century.
the
Some
stones were kissed by the faithful, like the Druid's Stone
in front of Chartres Cathedral, once carefully kept in the
crypt.
The Clock-Lohhrais, of Waterford, had a great reputation
for deciding difficult cases. But this virtue was lost under
circumstances thus narrated— " But the Good Stone, which
appears to have been a remnant of the golden age, was
finally so horrified at the ingenuity of a wicked woman
in defending her character, that it trembled with horror and
split in twain." It seems to have been as sensible and
sensitive as were those Pillar-stones near Cork, which, as
devoutly attested, being carried off to serve some vulgar
building
purposes, took the opportunity of nightly shades
to retreat to their old quarters. At last, in vexation, the
builder shot them into the water. After waiting the
departure of their sacrilegious captors, they mysteriously
glided back to their former standing-place.
These were not the only Holystones endowed with sense
and motion. At the command of a Saint, they have safely