Holy well, Coolkennedy, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Holy Sites & Wells

Holy well, Coolkennedy, Co. Tipperary

At Coolkennedy in County Tipperary, a spring rises in a patch of wet, marshy ground at the foot of a south-east-facing slope, and what remains of the structure built around it is easy to mistake for a simple hollow in the earth.

Holy wells in Ireland were typically shaped and enclosed by human hands, given walls and kerbs to mark them as set apart from the ordinary landscape, and this one was no different. A roughly rectangular pool, measuring approximately 7.4 metres by 3.6 metres and around 0.7 metres deep, was lined on its inner face with a drystone wall revetment still standing to about 0.8 metres in height. Drystone construction uses no mortar, the stones relying on their own weight and careful arrangement to hold together, which makes surviving examples particularly vulnerable to collapse over time. Much of the stone around the western perimeter of the pool has already come down.

The spring itself feeds two separate streams. One runs south-east toward the Poulaneigh River; the other runs north-east and eventually reaches the same river by a different course, making this a single source that drains in two directions at once, an unusual hydrological circumstance that may well have contributed to the site's sacred associations in earlier centuries. Springs that behaved in unexpected ways were often regarded as possessing particular virtue in the Irish tradition of well veneration, a practice with roots reaching back well before Christianity and continuing in some places into living memory. Today, the spring is choked with muck and algae, and the surrounding ground remains wet and difficult underfoot. The enclosing walls, once carefully built, are giving way to the marsh from which they were originally raised.

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