Basin Stone, Knowth Eastern Tomb

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The Basin Stone is an artefact dating from the Neolithic, located in the Eastern Tomb at Knowth, Brú na Bóinne World Heritage Site, Co. Meath, Ireland (ME019-030001-). It is made of fine-grained pink sandstone and located in the righthand (northern) recess of the tomb. The basin is circular in plan but is broken at the side and the rim. It is 0.62m high, 1.20m diameter and the basin’s max. depth is c. 0.25m. The surface is picked all over except an area on one side. This, and all the carving on the basin’s inner and outer surface, would have been achieved with a hard stone, possibly flint or quartz. A similarly decorated but smaller basin stone (c. 0.40m x 0.30m x 0.28m) was found at Knowth, but its present location is unknown. It is only known from an early eighteenth-century description and may have come from one of the small tombs.

Royal Irish Academy. Excavations at Knowth vol. 7: The megalithic art of the passage tombs at Knowth, County Meath. Digital Repository of Ireland (2023). Royal Irish Academy.