A visitor to Galway in 1833 saw what he described as a wolf-dog guardian at the entrance to the old Pro-Cathedral in Middle Street. He mentioned a ‘wonderful veneration of an ugly stone’ by the people of the city. It seems that he had heard in his youth about the ‘oddities of Popery’ and decided to come to Galway to see this for himself.
Upon entering the church, he was alarmed at the ‘curiously formed and most quizzical looking block of stone’. He said that all who entered the church regarded this carved stone with ‘a strange mixture of warm affection and mysterious dread’. He recorded that the ‘grisly, grinning, monster-shaped stone is placed immediately within the door of the Chapel; and seems to act as a sort of wolf-dog guardian of all the sacred mysteries of the interior. So dreadful is its countenance and with such a strong terror do the people regard it, that none of the persons I saw entering the Chapel either pass or approach it without having first well-blessed and crossed themselves and shake their digits and their skulls with holy water’. He observed one man putting his hand into the holy water font before going fearfully towards the carved block of stone and bowing in an apparent mixed state of terror and veneration. The man then knelt almost in worship of the stone object, and crawling forward he kissed the foot of the ‘deity’. Before entering the church, the man rises from his posture of fear and begins to stroke the back of this grisly object as one would acknowledge a pet. This stroking is performed four or five times on the ‘grim guardian’ of the church. The visitor remained there for about ten minutes, during which time he saw some twelve people performing the ceremony. This shocked the man as he had never seen such devout adoration of a stone image and felt that this worship should be offered to God. The man said that he never saw anything so appalling as people bowing and crawling before a block of stone. He also wrote to the editor of The Galway Weekly Advertiser expressing his opinion on the matter. It disappeared sometime later and despite making inquiries about the stone carving, no other reference to it could be found.