Saint Mochoaun's Well, Longridge, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Holy Sites & Wells
In a slight hollow on a south-facing slope in Co. Wexford, three stones sit at the base of a whitethorn tree beside a barely-visible sunken depression, roughly a metre across.
This is all that remains of a holy well, a site that appears on Ordnance Survey maps as far back as 1839, named in gothic lettering, and yet shows no sign of the ritual activity that once gathered around such places across Ireland. No votive offerings, no worn path, no record of a pattern, the seasonal communal gathering of prayer and festivity that characterised so many wells associated with early saints.
The well is almost certainly connected to St. Cuan of Airbhe, a figure from the early Irish church who founded Kilcowan church roughly two kilometres to the south-southwest. Cuan was a contemporary of St. Munna of Taghmon, and according to the scholar Pádraig Ó Riain, he raised Ceallachán, son of the king of the Fothairt, the people who gave their name to the Forth barony in south Wexford. Cuan's feast day fell on the 10th of July, a date when a pattern might plausibly have been observed, but none is on record. The antiquarian John O'Donovan noted the well around 1840, and it appears on both the 1839 and 1940 editions of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map, suggesting it retained some local recognition well into the twentieth century, even if active veneration had long since ceased. The name "Mochoaun" is likely a diminutive or variant form attached to Cuan, a common practice in early Irish hagiography where affectionate prefixes were added to a saint's name.
The well sits close to a north-south stream about twenty metres to the west, in a quietly unremarkable piece of Wexford farmland. Anyone seeking it out would find an overgrown depression and those three stones, nothing more. It is the kind of place that rewards the very particular satisfaction of finding something that has almost entirely returned to the landscape.