Tobernaslath (Finnleasrach), Ushnagh Hill, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Stone Monuments
On Ushnagh Hill in County Westmeath, a spring wells up beside an ancient ringfort, and at its eastern head sits a squared limestone boulder that may have been deliberately placed there.
Whether that stone was set upright as a marker, a boundary, or something more devotional is not entirely clear, but its positioning is deliberate enough to have attracted notice across the centuries.
By 1838, when a letter from Fenwick to Larcom was recorded in the Ordnance Survey Memoranda, the well was known as Tubber na Slath and was already described as a former place of pilgrimage, one that had fallen out of active use. Holy wells in Ireland typically accumulated layers of devotional practice over long periods, with patterns, the ritual circuits walked around a well or sacred site on particular feast days, gradually dying away as communities shifted or interest waned. The upright stone noted by Fenwick, standing approximately three feet high, adds a further dimension; such stones near wells often served as focal points for offerings or prayer, and their presence alongside ringforts, the circular earthwork enclosures common across early medieval Ireland, suggests these landscapes carried meaning long before and well beyond any single period of use. When a field observer visited in 1976, the spring was still described as fine and flowing, the ringfort immediately to the east, and the squared boulder still in place at the well's head.