Toberahoonard, Cathair Bó Sine, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Holy Sites & Wells
A concrete surround and a practical role supplying water to a farmyard are not what most people picture when they think of a holy well, yet that is the present condition of the well known as Toberahoonanara, or Tobar an Chapaill, meaning the Horse's Well, on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry.
It sits immediately south-west of the small settlement of Caherboshina, at the foot of the eastern slopes of Lateevemore, and to look at it now you would have little reason to suspect that it was ever anything other than a useful source of water.
Holy wells were focal points of local devotion throughout Ireland, often visited on the feast day of an associated saint, with patterns of prayer, ritual circumambulation, and the leaving of votive offerings. What remains of that tradition here is described as vague, a word worth pausing on. Folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair noted in 1960 that some memory of former devotions clung to the site, though the details had already grown indistinct by that point. The well also carries an alternative place-name, Toberahoonanara, and the Irish Tobar an Chapaill, the Horse's Well, a name that may hint at older associations now difficult to recover. The surrounding area, Corca Dhuibhne, the Dingle Peninsula, is extraordinarily dense with early Christian and prehistoric remains, and wells of this kind were often bound up with that longer landscape of sacred geography, even when the specific devotional practices attached to them faded from living memory.