Pillar, Lurga, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Utility Structures

Pillar, Lurga, Co. Mayo

In level pasture near the Mullaghaghanoe River in County Mayo, a dry-stone pillar once stood beside a holy well, marked on Ordnance Survey maps as far back as 1838.

By the time anyone thought to record it in detail, it was already gone. What survives is a small stone slab, roughly 24 centimetres wide and 30 centimetres tall, engraved with a simple cross on a triangular base and the date 1767. That slab, once balanced on top of the pillar, is now cemented into a modern shrine at the well's edge, slightly marooned from the structure it originally crowned.

The pillar itself was a substantial thing, by all accounts: a large, roughly square dry-stone construction, meaning it was built without mortar, relying on the careful stacking of stones for its stability. It appears on both the 1838 and 1920 six-inch Ordnance Survey maps, annotated simply as "Pillar", which suggests it was a recognised local landmark across at least a century of cartographic record. Its fate was decided in 1954, when the well was refurbished to mark the Marian Year, a worldwide Catholic observance that year celebrating the centenary of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. The refurbishment was presumably well-intentioned, but the pillar was dismantled in the process, and no trace of it now remains in the ground.

The cross-slab is the one tangible remnant, and it is still there to be seen, set into the shrine beside the well. It is easy to overlook as part of the modern structure, but the 1767 date and the simply carved cross with its triangular plinth connect it to a tradition of modest devotional stonework that predates almost everything else visible in the surrounding landscape.

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