Holy well, Aghade, Co. Carlow

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Holy Sites & Wells

Holy well, Aghade, Co. Carlow

Between a stream and a graveyard wall in Aghade, County Carlow, lies a holy well that cartographers kept faith with long after the well itself seemed to have been forgotten.

It appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1839 and 1908, quietly labelled and precisely located, which makes it all the more striking that by 1988 it had vanished entirely beneath vegetation, leaving no visible trace.

The well sits to the south-east of the Augustinian Abbey at Aghade, tucked into the narrow ground between a stream and the boundary wall of the adjoining graveyard. Holy wells in Ireland were typically sites of local devotion, associated with a patron saint and visited for healing or prayer, often on a specific feast day. The practice of "pattern" days, as these visits were called, could persist for centuries in a community even when institutional religion paid them little attention. Whether that kind of use continued here into the nineteenth or early twentieth century is not recorded, but the fact that the well was considered worth marking on the 1908 map suggests it retained some degree of local recognition well into the modern period. By the time anyone looked closely again, in 1988, it had been entirely reclaimed by growth, its exact form and condition unknown.

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