Altar, Tubrid More, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Tombs & Memorials
At a holy well in Tubrid More, Co. Kerry, the altar beside the water contains a piece of medieval stonework that almost certainly does not belong there.
Built into a rough stone structure close to the well's clear pool is a section of a tomb-chest, roughly a metre long and just under sixty centimetres high, carved with three ogee-headed niches. Ogee arches curve outward and then inward to a point, a form common in late medieval ecclesiastical carving. The niches hold worn figures: on the right, a mitred ecclesiastic with a crozier; on the left, a figure carrying a book, possibly female; in the centre, someone whose identity has been lost to erosion. The robes fall in what scholars call tubular folds, stiff and cylindrical, and the carving has a quality described by John Hunt in 1974 as provincial and primitive in execution, though he noted the persistence of a schematised C-shaped ear form found repeatedly in western Irish stonework. Hunt dated the piece to somewhere in the sixteenth century.
The well itself maps onto an older, stranger name. Both the 1841 to 1842 and 1898 Ordnance Survey maps record it as Tobernamolt, from the Irish Tobar na Molt, meaning the well of the wethers, a wether being a castrated ram. How that name attached itself to a site now associated with three early Christian saints, Brendan, Erc, and Ita, is not recorded. The slab on the altar depicts all three, and the site is held to be the burial place of St Ita, the sixth-century abbess from Limerick who was one of the most venerated female saints in early Irish Christianity. The tomb-chest panel is said to have been brought here from Ardfert Friary, a Franciscan house roughly a mile and a quarter to the south-west, though the exact circumstances of that journey are not known.
The well is still visited on specific Saturdays before May Day, the 24th of June, and the 29th of September. The pattern of devotion involves three rounds of three rosaries: the first recited around the grave, the second around the well and altar, and the third encompassing all three together. The water is believed to cure all ailments, whether drunk, bathed in, or carried away. The site is reached by a path through the fields, and the well sits within a small rectangular enclosure alongside a modest building.