Toberlonan, Clooney, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Holy Sites & Wells
In the marshy pasture south of the Ennistimon to Corrofin road, a small rectangular stone structure sits in a hollow, sealed over with concrete blocks and planks.
A rowan tree grows from one side of it. This is Toberlonan, Saint Lonan's Well, a holy well that was once visited by people seeking cures for sore eyes and ailments of the limbs, and which now sits quietly blocked up, largely unnoticed by those passing along the road above.
Holy wells in Ireland were typically sites of devotional practice known as "stations", a form of ritual pilgrimage involving prayers, circumambulation, and sometimes the leaving of offerings. When the antiquarian John O'Donovan recorded this well in 1839, he noted that stations were still being performed there and that cures were sought for diseases of the eyes and limbs, though he observed that the well had no fixed pattern day, the annual feast associated with the patron saint on which most such wells drew their largest gatherings. The name Tobar Lonain refers to Saint Lonan, and the well sits within what appears to have been a wider early medieval religious landscape: a medieval church, a graveyard, and a possible ecclesiastical enclosure lie roughly 180 metres to the north-east. The well itself appears on both the 1840 and 1916 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, suggesting it retained enough local significance to be mapped consistently across that period. According to local memory, it remained in active use until the end of the 1960s, its water drawn specifically as a remedy for sore eyes.
The structure itself is modest: a stone wall measuring roughly 1.5 metres square and standing to about 0.9 metres, now covered over. The rowan growing from its side is worth noting; rowan trees are frequently found at holy wells across Ireland, traditionally associated with protection and the threshold between the ordinary and the sacred. Whether that association is ancient at this particular site or simply incidental is impossible to say, but it gives the otherwise plain, sealed structure a quietly persistent atmosphere.