Lady Well, Bunown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Holy Sites & Wells

Lady Well, Bunown, Co. Westmeath

A holy well that has run dry sits in woodland on a west-facing slope above Killinure Bay in County Westmeath, enclosed by a low drystone wall with a small entrance on the western side.

Known locally as Lady Well, the circular basin measures roughly a metre across and a metre deep, but holds no water now, and no votive offerings, the small tokens and cloth ties that devotees traditionally leave at such sites, were visible when it was recorded. There is something quietly melancholy about a well of this kind without its water or its offerings; the ritual geography is all present, the enclosure, the orientation, the name invoking Our Lady, but the active life of the place has stilled.

The well sits about 200 metres north-northwest of Bunown church and its associated graveyard, placing it within a cluster of connected sacred features that would once have formed a coherent devotional landscape. Close by, just ten metres to the south-southwest, stands a boat house whose eastern gable contains a reused stone taken from Bunown Church itself. The stone is described as late medieval and punch-dressed, meaning its surface was worked with a pointed tool to produce a textured finish typical of the period. Someone, at some point, lifted it from the church ruins and set it in as a window head, a small act of salvage that inadvertently preserved a fragment of medieval craftsmanship in an unexpected domestic setting.

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Pete F
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