Toberblanra, Baunmore, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Holy Sites & Wells
A well in a field in County Galway holds two names at once, and that doubling hints at the layers folded into the site.
Cartographers recording the area in 1838 wrote "Toberblanra" on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a name that has stuck in official records ever since, yet locally the place has always been known as Lady's Well, a title that plants it firmly within the widespread Irish tradition of Marian holy wells, where spring water, Catholic devotion, and much older ideas about sacred ground tend to pool together.
When the well was inspected in November 1983, it was a compact but carefully maintained place. A roughly square enclosure, built mostly in drystone, the technique of stacking stone without mortar that is common across the west of Ireland, measured just over four metres on each side and opened to the south-east through a gap about one and a half metres wide. Inside, the well itself was a small pool barely a metre and a half across, flanked by a tree on either side. A recess built into the north wall held objects of devotion and what may have been a carved stone, though a heavy coat of whitewash made it impossible to say for certain. Outside the entrance, someone had constructed a concrete pier to support a glazed box containing a large statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, with a smaller boxed statue beside it. On the opposite side of the entrance gap, stones had been arranged into what appeared to be a kneeling pad, a detail that speaks plainly to the well's continuing use as a place of prayer. A well-worn path ran around the outside of the enclosure, and the base of a cross was recorded roughly four metres to the south-west. FÁS work schemes between 1987 and 1989 brought further improvements, and the surrounding area was later developed as a small park to mark the millennium year of 2000, giving the site a tidier setting without entirely smoothing away its older character.
