Holy well, Boleynanollag, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Holy Sites & Wells

Holy well, Boleynanollag, Co. Galway

A spring well in level County Galway grassland, bounded by a stream to the north and a rock outcrop to the south, might easily be passed over as a modest feature of the landscape.

What gives this one in Boleynanollag its particular character is the combination of things gathered around it: a pear-shaped well surround with a circular stone-walled chamber just a metre across, three stone steps descending to the water from the west, a large modern beehive-shaped grotto sheltering a statue of St Anne immediately to the east, and, roughly eight metres further east again, a children's burial ground. That last feature is a cillín, the Irish term for an informal burial ground traditionally used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground. The proximity of well and cillín is not unusual in the Irish countryside, where the boundaries between devotional, liminal, and funerary space were often deliberately blurred.

The well is dedicated to St Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary and a figure of considerable popular devotion in the west of Ireland. Ordnance Survey mapping carried out between 1912 and 1916 recorded the site simply as "Well" in Roman script on the 1:2500 plan, suggesting it was a recognised landmark even then, though the tradition of venerating it almost certainly predates that survey by centuries. The beehive-shaped grotto beside it is modern, added at some point after the original survey, and reflects the continuing practice of maintaining and embellishing holy wells as active places of prayer rather than leaving them as purely historical curiosities. The well is, by all accounts, still used as a place of devotion today.

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