Holy well, Glenglass, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Holy Sites & Wells

Holy well, Glenglass, Co. Wexford

A well that has lost its name twice over sits covered and largely forgotten on a west-facing slope in Glenglass, County Wexford.

On Ordnance Survey maps from 1839 and again from 1925, it was recorded without ceremony, marked simply as a well, with no indication of any sacred character. Yet local tradition holds that this was once the original St. Anne's Well, a holy well being a spring or source regarded as spiritually significant, often associated with a patron saint and used for devotional purposes across centuries of Irish religious life. At some point, that designation shifted northward, and the name travelled with it to a separate well now located roughly 1.8 kilometres to the north-north-west. What remained here was quietly buried, covered in and left without its former identity.

The setting reinforces the sense of something old and marginal. The well occupies a natural fold in the hillside, positioned at the headwaters of a small stream running north-east to south-west before it joins the larger Milltown stream some 350 metres to the south-west. It is the kind of sheltered, liminal spot that frequently attracted early religious activity in Ireland, and the surrounding landscape bears this out. A church site lies approximately 30 metres to the north-east, and a graveyard sits around 140 metres to the east-south-east, suggesting that this corner of Glenglass once formed a coherent if modest sacred complex. The well, the church, and the burial ground together trace a pattern common to early Irish ecclesiastical settlements, where water, worship, and the dead were arranged in close proximity.

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Pete F
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