St Anne's Well, St Anne's Park, Raheny, Dublin 5, Co. Dublin

The entrance is a pointed arch of rough stone, its threshold marked out with boulders, and the whole thing sits close to a pond and to a folly known as the Roman Tower. It looks, at first glance, like a piece of ancient fabric surviving by accident within a landscaped estate. It is not quite that, though the story it tells is more layered than a simple fake.

The well itself is older than the structure around it. It stood near the early Christian site at Raheny, one of two wells associated with that settlement, and tradition links it to Anu, a goddess whose name may survive in the nearby Naniken River. When Benjamin Lee Guinness and his brother Arthur bought Thornhill Estate in 1835, they renamed the property St Anne's after this well, even though the spring itself lay outside the estate's original boundary at the time. It was only in 1848, when the Guinnesses acquired part of Bettyville townland, that the well was formally brought within the demesne. Benjamin, and later his successor Lord Ardilaun, went on to expand the estate considerably over the following decades, but it was the well's presence, and its old associations, that had given the place its name from the start. The vault itself dates from around 1850, built in coursed rubble limestone using stone similar to that of other rustic follies scattered across the grounds. Benjamin Guinness had a documented taste for constructing sham antiquities, romantic structures designed to look older and more storied than they were, and this enclosure over a genuinely ancient spring fits that pattern closely. It is a case of real holy well and invented masonry sitting on top of one another, each lending the other a kind of credibility.

There is something quietly telling in the fact that the spring water itself can no longer be seen; the floor of the chamber covers it entirely, leaving only the stone shell as evidence that a well was ever here. Anyone visiting should look for the pointed arch opening and the boulder surround at the entrance, and note the proximity to the Roman Tower folly and the estate pond, since the well was clearly designed to be encountered as part of a sequence of picturesque features rather than as an isolated relic.