Fort, Miskaun Glebe, Co. Leitrim

Co. Leitrim |

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Fort, Miskaun Glebe, Co. Leitrim

When the Ordnance Survey mapped this corner of County Leitrim in 1835, the cartographers labelled the enclosure at Miskaun Glebe not as a holy well or a place of devotion, but as a fort.

The label was not entirely wrong. The circular earthen bank that defines the space, roughly thirty metres across and planted with deciduous trees along its western, northern, and eastern edges, does bear a close resemblance to a ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that dotted the Irish countryside from the early medieval period onwards. That the interior turned out to hold something quite different, a well dedicated to St Patrick that has drawn visitors for generations, gives the site an odd double identity that the old map only partially captures.

The enclosure sits on the north-eastern bank of a north-south stream, and within it the layering of time is unusually legible. Three wells occupy the same small ground. The one still in active use is a modern construction, but immediately to its west, sheltered beneath a rag-tree, lies an earlier circular well. Rag-trees, also called clootie trees, are a common feature of Irish holy well sites; people tie strips of cloth or small offerings to the branches as an act of petition or thanksgiving, the rags left to decay as the affliction or wish is symbolically transferred. To the east of the modern well sits a third, rectangular well, now defunct. A road bank cuts through the perimeter at the north-east, which means that the enclosure's original circuit is no longer quite complete, though the general form survives well enough to understand what it once looked like.

The site is reached by a path leading west from the public road, entering the enclosure from the east. Once inside, it is worth pausing to look back at the earthen bank and its tree cover, which together create the natural amphitheatre effect that makes the space feel set apart from the fields around it. The three wells, in their different states of use and disuse, repay close attention, particularly the older circular well beneath the rag-tree, whose position slightly off-centre from the working well hints at the slow drift of sacred sites across their own ground over time.

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