Holy well, Aughris, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Holy Sites & Wells

Holy well, Aughris, Co. Sligo

At Aughris Head in County Sligo, a natural spring seeps out from beneath a scarped slope at the edge of a pasture field, close enough to the rocky shoreline that the two feel almost continuous.

What is quietly unusual about this place is how entirely it has escaped the cartographic record; it appears on no edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which means it has existed, and been visited, entirely outside official documentation.

When the site was first formally inspected in 1993, it was simply a spring emerging from the base of the slope. In the years that followed, the community around it shaped it into something more deliberate. Stone slabs were used to enclose the spring into a small pool. Against the scarp, a drystone wall, three metres long and nearly two metres high, was built to shelter a slab-lined altar measuring roughly one and a half metres by seventy centimetres, on which a small modern statue of the Virgin Mary has been placed. Just to the east of the altar sits a prayer cairn, a low mound of small stones left by visitors, each stone representing an intention or a petition, a practice common at holy wells across Ireland. The whole enclosure is bounded by a post and wire fence. Local tradition holds the well to be dedicated to St. Patrick, linking it to the broader pattern of Patrician sites that dot the west of Ireland, though no documentary evidence of its origins survives.

The site sits in working pasture above the shoreline at Aughris Head, and the approach means crossing farmland. The prayer cairn beside the altar is the clearest indication that the well continues to draw quiet, irregular visitors, people who know it without needing a map to find it.

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Pete F
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