Cross, Donagh, Co. Monaghan
Co. Monaghan |
Crosses & Monuments
In the south-south-eastern corner of Donagh graveyard in County Monaghan, a small block of stone sits quietly among the graves, its socket perpetually filled with water.
It is known locally as the Wart Well, and despite its modest dimensions, it has attracted visitors for generations who come not to pay their respects to the dead, but to cure a skin complaint. The ritual is precise: a coin is brought to the well, the well is asked aloud to cure the wart, the coin is pressed against the affected skin, and the process is repeated three times. The coin is then left in the water. Local tradition holds that the water in the socket never dries up, regardless of the season.
The object itself is a stepped-pyramidal cross-base, a type of stone plinth designed to anchor a standing cross, with the socket at the top originally intended to receive the shaft of a large upright cross rather than to hold water. This particular base measures roughly 0.7 metres by 0.51 metres at its foot and rises 0.42 metres, tapering to a smaller platform at the top. It sits just east of the graveslab of Phelim Mac Kenna, and it is thought to have been the original base of the Donagh Cross, a separate monument that now stands in the north-west quadrant of the same graveyard. At some point the base and shaft were parted, and the base, left where it stood, gradually accumulated the kind of local significance that stone and water in Ireland so often attract together. The repurposing of a Christian monument's structural component into a folk-healing site is not unusual in an Irish context, where the boundaries between ecclesiastical stonework and older curative traditions have long been permeable.