Holy well, Baunballinlough, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Holy Sites & Wells
In the rolling pasture of Baunballinlough, Co. Kilkenny, a holy well sits capped in concrete, pressed into service as a cattle pump.
The quiet indignity of that repurposing is, in its own way, a piece of Irish social history: a site once set apart for devotion, reduced by 1987 to agricultural utility, its sacred character surviving only on paper.
The well's ecclesiastical identity is preserved on a Grand Jury map, the term referring to the county-level administrative bodies that preceded modern local government in Ireland and that commissioned detailed regional surveys in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These maps occasionally captured features, holy wells among them, that had already begun to fade from active use. Whether this well ever attracted pattern days, the traditional annual gatherings of prayer and communal celebration that were once attached to holy wells across Ireland, the surviving record does not say. What it does confirm is that the site was recognised formally enough to warrant inclusion on an official cartographic record, which suggests it held some local significance at the time of mapping. By the time it was inspected in the late twentieth century, the concrete cap had long since replaced whatever stone surround or informal marker may once have distinguished it.