Tobermoon, Kilmoon, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Holy Sites & Wells
In the flat pastureland of County Clare, not far from the edge of the Burren, there is a holy well site that once drew crowds for an annual pattern day and was attended by a holy tree and cursing stones.
Pattern days, from the Irish "patron", were devotional gatherings held at sacred sites on a saint's feast day, typically involving circumambulation of the well, prayer, and sometimes more ambiguous folk rites. The cursing stones here add a particularly charged dimension to the site. Such stones, usually rounded and turned counter-clockwise while reciting an imprecation, represent a tradition the Church rarely endorsed and often tried to suppress.
The site takes its name from Tobar Mhuadháin, a well dedicated to Saint Mhuadhán, recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 as Tobermoon. By 1839, OS field workers noted that stations, the formal rounds of prayer performed at sacred sites, were still being carried out here. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in the early twentieth century, documented the presence of both the holy tree and the cursing stones alongside the well. In 1998, local residents recalled that the site had been actively used at least into the 1940s, when the pattern day still drew people. What remains on the ground is a crude, sub-oval drystone enclosure, roughly four metres east to west and three and a half metres north to south, standing about one and a half metres high, with a narrow opening on its southern side that may once have served as an entrance. Inside, now overgrown, are architectural fragments and rubble. A rectangular building abuts the north-west side of this structure, and Kilmoon church stands approximately 157 metres to the north-east within its graveyard, the ecclesiastical and the folk-devotional sitting in quiet proximity across the pasture.