Tober Lastragh, Edmondstown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Holy Sites & Wells
In the low-lying pasture of County Westmeath, there is a well known locally as the Blazing Well, a name that sits oddly against its present reality: a largely dried-up hollow defined by a concrete surround, overhung by a lime tree, and invisible from the air.
The name Tober Lastragh, or Tobar Lasrach in Irish, translates roughly as the well of Saint Lasrach, and it carries enough accumulated strangeness, a fiery epithet, a vanished congregation, a sport now associated with fairgrounds rather than sacred sites, to reward closer attention than its unremarkable appearance might suggest.
The well appears by name on the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which at least fixes it firmly in the landscape of early nineteenth-century Westmeath. Folklore gathered through the Irish Schools' Collection, a nationwide project in the 1930s in which schoolchildren recorded local traditions from older community members, describes Saint Lasrach as having founded a church in the area at an early period. That claim is difficult to verify independently, but early Irish saints are frequently associated with both wells and church foundations, the well often predating the Christian attribution and being absorbed into it over time. What the folklore also preserves is a memory of the Pattern, the seasonal gathering held at holy wells, typically on a saint's feast day, which combined religious observance with socialising, music, and games. At this particular well, it seems, wrestling was among those games. Even the collector who recorded the account acknowledged that information about the Pattern was hard to come by, suggesting the tradition had already faded by the 1930s. By 1976, when the site was formally described, the well itself had mostly dried up.
The site sits within a flat cemetery and lies roughly thirty-six metres to the south-east of a nearby stream. The lime tree noted in the folklore account was still present as of the most recent records, offering a continuity of sorts between the living tradition and the physical place.