Tobermore, Moyne, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Holy Sites & Wells
At the base of a rocky knoll in the flat, poorly drained pastureland of north Mayo, a marshy pool sits quietly in a modern drainage channel, roughly 250 metres from the shores of Killala Bay.
Nothing about it announces itself. And yet the name alone, Tobermore, carries weight: in Irish, tobar mór means "great well", and the word tobar appears repeatedly across the Irish landscape wherever a spring was once considered significant, often sacred.
The well appears by its current name on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from both 1838 and 1929, which suggests it was a recognised feature of the local landscape across at least a century of cartographic record. It is fed by a natural spring rising from the base of the knoll, and immediately to the south the ground rises sharply onto a rocky terrace where an old church stands. Holy wells, which were freshwater sources venerated for their supposed curative or spiritual properties and often associated with a particular saint or feast day, were very commonly sited in close relation to early ecclesiastical buildings in Ireland. The proximity here is suggestive, though no specific traditions or patron saint have been recorded for this particular spring.
The well has since been absorbed into a broad modern drain running northward, which has changed its character considerably. What may once have been a distinct and tended feature of the religious landscape is now easy to overlook entirely, a pool in a ditch at the edge of a field, with a church on the rise behind it and the bay just visible ahead.
