Saint Bicseagh's Well, Ballynacroghy, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Holy Sites & Wells

Saint Bicseagh’s Well, Ballynacroghy, Co. Westmeath

A holy well that moves of its own accord is not the kind of detail that tends to appear in official records, yet that is precisely what local tradition holds about this modest spring on marshy ground in County Westmeath.

Known locally as Bixie Well, it sits in poorly drained land near the townland boundary with Kilbixy, marked, at least when visited in the mid-1980s, by nothing more than a wooden sign and a cluster of thorn bushes hung with two pieces of rag. The practice of tying rags to vegetation beside a holy well is an old devotional custom, the rags sometimes called clooties, left as offerings or as tokens of a petition for healing. By 1985, according to Bradley's account, the stone surround that once enclosed the well had been largely obliterated, the spring reduced in practical terms to a drinking hole for cattle.

The well takes its name from Saint Bigseach, known in Irish as Bhiscí, meaning Little Lady, a sixth-century saint credited with founding the monastery at Kilbixy, the remains of which lie roughly 650 metres to the north-west. That cluster of sites in the immediate area, including a second holy well dedicated to Saint Bridget and a deserted medieval settlement, both also within 650 metres, suggests this corner of Westmeath was once a place of considerable religious and communal activity. The folklore attached to the well was recorded in 1938 as part of the Irish Schools' Collection, when a fourteen-year-old pupil named Jennie Masterson, from Crumlin or Rockfield, wrote down a story told to her by her father Patrick, then aged fifty-four. In his account, the well had originally been located in Cumminstown before it moved to the parson's field in Kilbixy. He listed its curative properties as rheumatism, sciatica, growing pains, and sore eyes, and noted that visitors could come on any day, draw water, and were expected to leave a piece of rag on the side of the well.

The well sits in genuinely wet ground, so the approach is likely to be soft underfoot in all but the driest weather. The thorn bushes noted in earlier visits are a typical marker for wells of this kind in the Irish landscape, and the absence of elaborate stonework is itself characteristic of many rural holy wells that survived not through formal preservation but through quiet, persistent local regard.

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