Holy well, Lissaniska West, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Holy Sites & Wells
Most holy wells in Ireland accumulate centuries of ritual: patterns, pilgrimages, offerings left on branches, a saint's feast day marked in the local calendar.
This one, tucked into a woodland copse in Lissaniska West, County Limerick, has none of that. It sits quietly within an old enclosure, stone-lined and roughly circular, and by the mid-twentieth century at least, carried with it no tradition of devotions whatsoever. That absence is itself worth pausing over.
The well is dedicated, according to the Ordnance Survey Letters, those invaluable nineteenth-century field records compiled by surveyors travelling parish by parish across Ireland, to St Mida or Ida. The saint's name admits of two possible forms, and no further local tradition appears to have survived to settle the question. The well occupies the north-western quadrant of a larger enclosure, a roughly defined area of enclosed ground that likely has its own earlier history. The pool itself is modest: approximately 2.8 metres north to south and 2.4 metres east to west, with a maximum depth of around 0.65 metres. Its edges are roughly stone-lined, and an outflow drain exits from the western side, running in an east-northeast to west-southwest direction through the enclosing bank. Folklorist and scholar Caoimhín Ó Danachair visited and photographed the site in 1954, and his images, now held by the National Folklore Collection at UCD, are accessible through the Dúchas archive online at duchas.ie.
The well sits within a woodland setting, which means light and ground conditions vary considerably with the season; late spring or summer, when the canopy is full but the undergrowth has not become impenetrable, is likely the most practical time to visit. The wider enclosure provides some navigational context once you are on site. Ó Danachair's 1954 photographs offer a useful point of comparison for anyone curious about how the site has changed over the intervening decades, and both images are freely viewable through the Dúchas photographic collection at the references F025.21.00268 and F025.21.00269.