Holy well, An Máimín, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Holy Sites & Wells

Holy well, An Máimín, Co. Galway

At low tide on the Connemara shoreline near An Máimín, a small natural hollow in the rock holds a single coin.

That is, apparently, all it contains. No votive rags tied to a nearby bush, no carved stone, no formal surround of any kind. Just a pothole worn smooth by water into the outer flank of a sloping rock, sitting below the high-water mark and filling and emptying with the tides. That a coin was placed there at all is what marks it out as a holy well, a category that in Ireland encompasses everything from elaborately maintained roadside shrines to barely perceptible depressions in stone that locals have long regarded as sacred. This one sits at the quieter end of that spectrum.

The well lies roughly 300 metres south-west of the quay known as Céibh Poll Uí Mhuirin, on the shoreline itself. The detail about the coin comes from a T. Robinson, cited in Paul Gosling's Archaeological Inventory of County Galway, Vol. I, published in 1993. The inventory entry carries a candid note: "not visited", meaning the site was recorded at one remove, through local knowledge rather than direct inspection. That the sole piece of evidence for its sacred status is a single coin reported by a single informant gives the place an appealingly provisional quality. Whether the coin was still there when the inventory was compiled, or whether it remains there now, is simply unknown.

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Pete F
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