The Blessing Stone of St Dogmaels, the stone that has been used as a place to bless fishing boats since the Middle Ages.

The Blessing Stone is situated next to a small public park in St Dogmael’s Pembrokeshire, Wales, on the banks of the Teifi estuary.
It seems if struck soundly an echo is created from the sound bouncing off the opposite bank.
The stone, also called Carreg Ateb (not by chance Echo Stone), was re-discovered in the 1960s.

Traditionally the Vicar of the neighbouring Abbey would perform an annual ceremony to bless the fishing boats, seine net fishing with coracles, from this stone.
He stood on the stone to bless the craft, although previously the Abbot from the now-ruined Abbey at St Dogmaels would have performed the task.
The vessels traditionally known as “coracles”, were small wood-framed, single-person boats covered in animal skin or pitched linen used for the ancient practice of seine net fishing.
This involved a net being suspended between two coracles and used to catch salmon or trout.

Even more mysterious is the past of the stone itself.
It has the appearance of a dolmen capstone (from the Breton taol-maen or ‘stone table’), and there are other stones nearby that may have acted as supports.
A dolmen, sometimes called a portal tomb, is a type of single-chamber megalithic tomb, usually consisting of two or more upright stones supporting a large flat horizontal capstone or “table.” Most date from the early Neolithic period and were sometimes covered with earth or smaller stones to form a tumulus.
These ancient monuments are made of spotted dolerite (bluestone), a basalt which occurs at several outcrops in the Preseli Mountains, which provided the main sources for the famous Stonehenge bluestones.

Images from web – Google Research