Holy well, Kilmanoge, Co. Wicklow

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Holy Sites & Wells

Holy well, Kilmanoge, Co. Wicklow

In the townland of Kilmanoge in County Wicklow, there was once a holy well set within a triangular enclosure, accompanied by the fragment of a millstone or quern.

By 1990, nothing of it could be found at all.

The well is known from the Ordnance Survey Letters, a remarkable series of nineteenth-century field reports compiled as part of the great mapping project of Ireland. Transcribed and published by Michael O'Flanagan in 1928, these letters recorded local antiquities, placenames, and traditions that surveyors encountered in the field. At Kilmanoge, the letter writer noted a roughly triangular enclosure measuring around 18.6 metres across, with the well positioned in its north-eastern angle. Nearby lay part of a millstone or quern, a rotary grinding stone of the kind used for processing grain, which may point to some domestic or small-scale industrial activity in the vicinity, or may simply have accumulated beside a site that was already old and locally significant. Holy wells in Ireland typically attracted patterns, which were seasonal devotional gatherings involving circumambulation of the site, prayers, and offerings, though no such practices are specifically recorded here. When the site was inspected in 1990, no visible trace of the enclosure, the well, or the stone fragment remained.

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