Tobernacrusha, Ballinclare, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Holy Sites & Wells

Tobernacrusha, Ballinclare, Co. Kerry

At the meeting point of three townlands on the Dingle Peninsula, a small upright stone stands over a well that no longer holds water.

The stone, which gives the site its Irish name, Tobar na Croise, the well of the cross, bears a plain Latin cross carved in relief on its eastern face. Around it, on what a 1942 survey described as an eastern stone, are clusters of smaller crosses, each one cut by a pilgrim's hand at some unrecorded moment, a quiet accumulation of individual acts of devotion pressed into the rock over generations. The well itself, once measuring roughly six feet by three and covered with protective flagstones, has since run dry, leaving the slab as the most tangible trace of what was once a working penitential station.

The route taken by pilgrims, known in Irish as a turas, involved a specific and ordered sequence of prayer and movement. Writing in 1960, the folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair described the practice as it was still being observed at that time, albeit by fewer people than in earlier years. The pilgrim would recite a rosary while walking to the well, then make nine circuits of it, saying a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria during each circuit. After completing the rounds at the well, the pilgrim would walk about 600 yards to the south-west, to a place at the cliff's edge called Bun an Turais, the end of the pilgrimage, where further prayers were said. There is some discrepancy in the sources about the feast day associated with the site: a 1939 account by An Seabhac placed the turas on the 27th of August, while Ó Danachair recorded it as Saint John's Day at midsummer, suggesting the practice may have shifted over time, or that different traditions coexisted.

The site sits at the junction of Ballinclare, Farrannacarriga, and Gurteen, a boundary location that is itself characteristic of holy wells in Ireland, which were often associated with liminal or transitional places in the landscape. The stone measures 0.88 metres high and 0.31 metres wide. For anyone visiting, Bun an Turais at the cliff edge to the south-west remains part of the wider sacred geography of the place, and the carved crosses on the eastern stone are worth examining closely as evidence of the site's long use as a place of private and communal religious practice.

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