[The Stone of Denial, Bruree]

Image of pictorial inscription showing cow suckling a calf. As acknowledged by Chatterton, this illustration, and most of the accompanying text, is taken from Thomas Crofton Croker, Landscape Illustrations of Moore's Irish Melodies: With Comments for the Curious, Part 1 (London: J. Power, 1835).

Image Details

Genre	Scientific or Technical illustration
Technique	Woodcuts
Subject(s)	Antiquities and archaeological sites
Geographical Location	Bruree – Village Limerick – County Munster – Province
Keyword(s)	Antiquities, Archaeological sites, Livestock, Sculpture
Colour	Monochrome
Published / created	1839

Bibliographical Details

Travel Account	Rambles in the South of Ireland
Contributor(s)	Henrietta Georgiana Marcia Chatterton — Role: Author of travel text
Print or manuscript	Print
Location of image in copy	Vol. 2, p. 234
Source copy	James Hardiman Library, National University of Ireland Galway Special Collections: 914.190481 CHA
Permalink	https://ttce.universityofgalway.ie/irelandillustrated/view/image/ii_image_1372184581

Related text from travel account

Monday.—This morning we took a long ramble after breakfast, along the banks of the Maig, on which the sun shone brilliantly, making every winding distinct in the distance. There is a curious circumstance related in the Landscape Illustrations of Moore's Irish Melodies, connected with this pretty river. At Bruree, in the county of Limerick, a place memorable as the scene of the last assembly or session of Irish bards in 1746, there is a stone nearly in the centre of the River Maig, on which is very rudely sculptured a cow with a calf sucking, the work evidently of a very remote age, and here accurately copied. [Image: The Stone of Denial, Bruree] It is called in Irish, "the stone of denial" (cloch eura), and is traditionally said to be a [p. 235] memorial of a circumstance in the life of St. Senanus, that holy man who lived on Scattery Island, and whose ungallant conduct toward the beautiful St. Canera, I mentioned when we passed near it. The occurrence to which this rude sculpture relates, is in the Acta Sanctorum, from which Moore has quoted in a note to the melody. The old latin manuscript tells us of St. Senanus Who being bound by holy vows, Was sent to tend the abbot’s cows: When so it chanced one day, while praying, Most fervently his bead-roll saying He saw the calves by stealth approaching. And on their mother’s teats fall poaching. So, seeing that the rogues would bilk The honest friars of their milk, Away his rosary he flung, To part the cattle from their young; And in the ground he fixed his staff, To keep each mother from her calf: Thus while Senanus prayed to heaven, Nor cow nor calf, from morn to even, Saw he attempt approximation, Each by the staff kept in their station." [Vol. 2, pp. 234-235]