Holy well, Bohercarron, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Holy Sites & Wells
A small well built into a roadside ditch might not seem like much to pause over, but this one in Bohercarron carries a name that points toward something older and less easily explained.
Recorded on the 1927 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as Tobergobinet, the well sits quietly beside the road, its water finding its way northward through an outfall that eventually joins the Camogue river. What makes it quietly puzzling is not so much what survives as what does not: the name endures, the stonework remains, but the tradition behind it has gone entirely.
The folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair noted in 1955 that the well went by two names among local people, some calling it Abby's Well and others Gobinet's Well, a detail he drew from an earlier source in Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge. Gobinet, or Gobnait, is an early Irish saint particularly associated with County Cork, and holy wells dedicated to her are known elsewhere in Munster, though what connected her name to this particular spot in Limerick is no longer known. Ó Danachair recorded plainly that no tradition survives, which is itself a kind of historical record, a note of something once present and now absent. The well was formally reported to the Archaeological Survey of Ireland in October 2012 by Sarah McCutcheon, archaeologist with Limerick County Council, who documented its construction in some detail. The stonework is mortared and carefully built, with a flat slate roof, now partially missing, and a small recess cut into the east wall just inside the opening, the sort of niche that may once have held a votive object or a vessel for offerings.
The well sits at the roadside and is visible from the road, though its condition warrants care. McCutcheon noted in 2012 that one section of the slate roof was already gone, a side wall was slightly bulged, and the capstones were at risk. The interior is compact, roughly 0.9 metres by 0.82 metres and about 1.2 metres high in the masonry, and the opening narrows due to a projecting stone on the east side. There is no formal access arrangement, and the surrounding ditch means the ground can be soft. The well is worth a look for anyone with an interest in the quiet infrastructure of early Irish religious practice, the small built things that once anchored local devotion to particular places, even when the stories that explained them have long since faded.