Holy well, Cahernarry, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Holy Sites & Wells
A holy well is only as alive as the people who tend it, and the one at Cahernarry in County Limerick tells the story of what happens when that tending quietly stops.
The spring sits just north of a field boundary on a gently sloping stretch of open pasture, facing north-west across undulating farmland. Around it, a rough arc of un-hewn limestone blocks, about a metre across, marks the old enclosure of the source. Immediately to the north-east, a shallow depression about five metres in diameter is still known locally as the pond, suggesting that the well once drew enough water, or enough visitors, to shape the land around it in a meaningful way. Today, the whole monument is so heavily masked by dense vegetation that you could walk the field without ever suspecting it was there.
The well was placed under the patronage of St Senan, a sixth-century monastic founder associated principally with Scattery Island in the Shannon Estuary, though his cult spread widely across Counties Limerick, Clare, and Kerry. Holy wells, which are typically natural springs credited with healing or protective powers and associated with a local saint, were once focal points for patterns, the seasonal gatherings of prayer and communal ritual that marked a saint's feast day. By the mid-1950s, however, the folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair visited and recorded plainly that there were no devotions being observed at Cahernarry (Ó Danachair, 1955). He also photographed the site in 1954, and those images survive in the National Folklore Collection at UCD, accessible through the Dúchas archive online, giving a rare fixed point against which to measure how far the vegetation has advanced in the intervening decades.
Finding the well requires some patience. The site lies in private farmland, so access would depend on the goodwill of the landowner and appropriate enquiry beforehand. The limestone blocks are the clearest physical indicator of the spring's location, though the dense scrub means they may not be immediately visible. Visiting in late winter or early spring, before the vegetation reaches full cover, gives the best chance of making out the arc of stones and the slight hollow of the pond. The Dúchas photographs, taken in 1954 and freely viewable at duchas.ie, are worth consulting before a visit, both as a guide to what you are looking for and as a document of the site at a moment when living memory of its use was only just fading.