Brides Well, Longridge, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Holy Sites & Wells
Beneath a field of pasture in County Wexford, a holy well dedicated to St Bride lies completely invisible from the surface.
No hollow, no stone surround, no votive rag marks the spot. The well appears on both the 1839 and 1840 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, labelled in gothic lettering as Bride's Well, a typographic convention the OS reserved specifically for antiquities and places of historical or religious significance. That it was thought worth marking twice across a century of mapping, and yet leaves no trace today, gives it a quietly unsettling quality.
Its importance, however, predates the Ordnance Survey by two centuries at least. In the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a systematic assessment of land ownership carried out after the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, St Bride's Well on the land of Baldwinstown is used as the fixed starting point for describing the boundary of the medieval parish of Kilmannan. That kind of documentary role, as a landmark precise enough to anchor a legal boundary, speaks to how well-established and locally understood the site must have been. It sits approximately 180 metres south of the point where three medieval parishes, Kilmannan, Mularankin, and Kilcowan, once met, and about 40 metres west of what is still known as Brideswell Bridge, a name that preserves the memory of the well even as the well itself has vanished. Holy wells dedicated to St Bride, or Brigid, are found throughout Ireland, often associated with healing, with parish boundaries, or with the early Christian landscape of the fifth and sixth centuries, though nothing in the surviving record describes the particular character or customs of this one.