The Holestone at Doagh stand about 5 foot tall and has a hole located about 3 foot up wide enough for the average hand to fit through, hands have been stuck inside it before so try it at your own risk!
Holestones have an unclear but fascinating history in Gaelic history and culture. Great standing stones are dotted across the Celtic isles but holestones are very few in number. And what makes them unique is the hole! It’s believed that the holestones at Doagh is a betrothal stone. Local legend says that since the 1800s at least that lovers would hold hands through the opening in the stone and be betrothed if there wasn’t a priest available to do a legal marriage, like the tradition of hand fasting. It’s easy to think that a tradition that has only been recorded for 200 years has little in common with the Bronze Age makers of the stone but there is a connection. During the Pagan Tailteann games mass marriages would be held with a temporary holed wooden structure being erected and couples clasping hands to be married.
A poet's theory about the stone’s purpose is that it was used in a fertility ritual although there isn’t a myth or practice recorded that would support that.
We know that there are at least another two Holestones remaining, one in Munster, the marriage stone in Caherurlagh, Sheepshead, Kilcrohane, Co Cork and another in Galloway, Scotland. It’s not clear if there are any older myths attached to these stones but I think it’s fair to assume they were used for the same purpose as the stone at Doagh, as their current myths are both about marriage. There being a Holestone in Munster was particularly upsetting for believers of the ancient Ulaid and Dal Ríada being Picts rather than Gaels.
Interestingly, this isn’t the only time a Pagan rock was used as a substitute priest. On an Irish western island the people there prayed to a stone statue during the winter months when there was no priest there. As you might imagine once the Catholic Church found out about this, a priest made the journey to the island to destroy the false idol and cast it into the sea.
When we consider where the Holestone at Doagh is, it’s hard to believe it’s survival. The changes in peoples in South Antrim and the entirety of the eastern half island throughout the millennia has seen the destruction of so many aspects of Gaelic life, language, customs, families and monuments. The following quote sums it up perfectly.
“I can think of no prehistoric monument of whose written history we know nothing the use and purpose of which have been so well preserved by inviolable tradition as the Hole Stone. From times long prehistoric a ring was regarded as part of the ceremony of Arrhae or betrothal prior to the marriage ceremony itself. To this day, through all the changes of race and peoples that have occurred in County Antrim, particularly South Antrim, the tradition that the Holestone is a betrothal, if not a marriage token remains unbroken, and couples from all the district round still plight their troths by clasping fingers through the ring or hole in this stone. Here then appears the probability that the souterrain builders refrained from using the Hole Stone, because it was sacred in their pagan religion, if not actually a deity.”(1)
Well if you say so. From some 'Tentative Deductions' about the stone in The Irish Naturalists' Journal, Vol. 3, No. 5 (Sep., 1930) by HC Lawlor.