Toberineenboy, Glensleade, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Holy Sites & Wells

Toberineenboy, Glensleade, Co. Clare

A holy well in a rush-filled field on a south-east-facing slope in County Clare, dedicated to a saint whose feast day falls on the 29th of December, is not the kind of place that draws casual visitors.

Yet this modest spring, known in Irish as Tobar Iníon Baoith, sits on the townland boundary between Glensleade and Baur North and carries a name that has appeared on Ordnance Survey maps since at least 1842. Local tradition holds that leaving an offering at the well would cure warts, a belief of the kind that clung to Irish holy wells for centuries and which speaks to the long overlap between devotional practice and folk medicine.

The saint to whom the well is dedicated, Inghean Bhaoith, meaning the daughter of Boetius, was recorded by the scholar Eugene O'Curry as the great patroness of the Dalcassians, the early medieval tribal grouping from which the O'Brien dynasty of Clare and Munster descended. Her memory was annually revered on the 29th of December, making this one of the later entries in the liturgical calendar of well veneration. Sixteen metres to the north-north-east of the spring and its associated pond, two concentric stone structures survive: a small circular one roughly 3.2 metres in diameter and up to 0.6 metres high, set inside a larger, slightly oval enclosure measuring around 7 metres east to west and 6 metres north to south, with what appears to be an entrance on the eastern side. These may represent the structural remains of the well itself, or they may be a penitential station, a place where pilgrims performed circuits of prayer as part of their devotions, a common feature at Irish holy sites. The ambiguity has not been resolved, and that unresolved quality is rather characteristic of places like this.

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