Saint Feighin's Well, Wellpark, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Holy Sites & Wells
A small semicircular wall of dry-laid stone, less than a metre across, sits in a field in Wellpark and feeds a thin stream into the surrounding pasture.
It is easy to miss, and easier still to underestimate. Yet for generations, people came to this well not for drinking water but for their eyes, believing the water carried curative properties. Rags were tied to the hawthorn tree beside it, a practice common at Irish holy wells whereby offerings or strips of cloth, sometimes called clooties, were left as petitions or tokens of gratitude after visiting.
The well is dedicated to Saint Feighin and lies roughly thirty metres to the north-east of the graveyard that bears the same name. The timing of devotional visits here was never entirely settled. Writing in 1909, Dalton recorded that the devotional rounds took place on the last three Saturdays in September, while local tradition held that the well was visited each year between the fifteenth of July and the fifteenth of August. That second tradition has since lapsed. Two small stone cairns beside the well are recognised as penitential stations, meaning they formed part of a structured circuit of prayer, a pattern of movement around sacred points that was central to Irish well devotion. A pattern day, the annual communal gathering associated with a local saint, is now observed on the thirty-first of July. The well's entrance faces north, and the enclosing wall, modest as it is, gives the site a defined, purposeful character that distinguishes it from an ordinary spring.