Holy well, Glebe, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Holy Sites & Wells

Holy well, Glebe, Co. Westmeath

On a hillside in County Westmeath, a basin cut directly into solid rock sits at the apex of a stone quarry, reputedly never running dry.

It belongs, according to local tradition, not to the better-known St Meehan, but to his sister, a figure named Eaumas, whose well carries its own distinct reputation: the cure of warts.

The two wells form a pair, each attached to a sibling saint. St Meehan's well, also recorded as St Mignas's well, is located in the townland of Glon, near Glebe in County Westmeath. Folklore gathered from pupils at Castlepollard School, as part of the nationwide Schools' Collection of the late 1930s in which teachers and children documented local traditions, recorded both sites in some detail. The sister's well is the more structurally striking of the two: not a natural spring fitted with a stone surround, but a vessel chiselled out of the rock face itself, high up in a quarry, and described as always full of water regardless of the season. The attribution of a healing well to a female saint's sibling rather than to the primary figure is relatively unusual, and Eaumas does not appear in the more commonly consulted martyrologies, which makes the Castlepollard schoolchildren's account a rare surviving record of her local cult.

The wart cure associated with Eaumas's well fits a pattern found at holy wells across Ireland, where specific ailments were linked to particular saints or sites, often through long-standing ritual practice rather than any formal religious sanction. What is less common here is the combination of an almost geologically precise description, a basin hewn from the quarry's apex, with the persistence of a named but otherwise largely unrecorded female saint. The detail that the well is always full of water, preserved in a child's account from a rural school, is the kind of observation that formal records rarely bother to keep.

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