Holy well, Bolabaun, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Holy Sites & Wells
A well dedicated to Saint Nicholas of Myra sits quietly in a fold of County Wexford countryside, though the Nicholas in question is not quite who most people might expect.
This is not the jolly figure of Victorian Christmas cards but a fourth-century bishop from what is now Turkey, a man celebrated for generosity and gift-giving whose feast falls on the 6th of December and whose legend eventually fed into the modern figure of Santa Claus. The well appears on the 1941 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map under his name, but that is more or less where the documentary trail ends. There is no record of a pattern, the communal gathering for prayer and festivity that typically marked a holy well in the Irish calendar, and today there is no visible evidence of veneration either.
The well itself is a modest structure excavated into the base of a steep south-facing slope, measuring roughly 1.35 metres east to west and 1.1 metres north to south, with a depth of 1.7 metres on the upslope northern side. It was lined with stones, though these have since collapsed inward. Water still seeps from it and runs the short distance south to a stream that cuts across the land on a south-west to north-east axis. What draws this site into slightly sharper focus is a note from the Ordnance Survey field memoirs indicating that the well was visited for health cures as recently as the 1940s, meaning living memory overlaps with a practice that had otherwise left no physical trace. About 280 metres downstream to the north-east lies the church site of Chapel Carron, a reminder that this quiet corner of Wexford once carried a more substantial sacred geography than anything visible on the ground today.