Trinity Well, Tincurra, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Holy Sites & Wells
Holy wells in Ireland usually accumulate stories.
Rags tied to nearby branches, patterns held on a saint's feast day, local cures attributed to the water. The small well at Tincurra in County Wexford carries none of that. It sits quietly in the valley of a northeast-southwest stream, a few metres from an old graveyard, bearing the distinctly ecclesiastical name Trinity Well, and yet there is no surviving record of veneration attached to it whatsoever.
The well appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1839 and 1925, each time marked in gothic lettering, the typographic convention cartographers reserved for antiquities and features of religious or historical note. The name alone implies a connection to the Christian Trinity, and its proximity to the graveyard and church at Tincurra, roughly twenty metres to the west, makes an ecclesiastical association plausible. The structure itself is modest but deliberate: a rectangular stone-lined well measuring just over a metre by seventy centimetres, built into the slope of the valley and covered by a masonry canopy less than a metre high, with an opening facing southeast. The canopy suggests that someone, at some point, considered the well worth sheltering and marking permanently. Whether it once served the church community, acted as a water source, or held some devotional function that simply went unrecorded, the historical evidence does not say.