Holy well, Eoghanacht, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Holy Sites & Wells
On a limestone bluff above Inis Mór, there is a hollow in the rock barely wide enough to cup your hands in, and yet it was once a place of pilgrimage.
The site, about 300 metres south-west of the village of Eoghanachta, is known locally as Bullán na Caillí, a name that translates roughly as the hollow of the old woman or hag. A bullán is a term for a rounded depression in stone, often found at early Christian sites across Ireland, and this one is a natural rather than a worked hollow, measuring just 0.65 metres long and 0.4 metres wide. It sits at the crest of the bluff, exposed to the Atlantic weather that sweeps across the island.
When the anthropologists Haddon and Browne visited in 1893, they recorded votive offerings left on an alder bush growing over the well, a practice consistent with the pattern of folk devotion that persisted at holy wells across Ireland long after the formal church had moved on. Votive offerings at such sites typically included rags, coins, or small personal items left in hope of healing or intercession. Neither the bush nor any trace of the offerings survives today. Earlier references to the site appear in Haverty's 1859 account and in Waddell's 1973 survey, suggesting it had drawn attention from visitors and scholars for well over a century before even those records were made.