Holy well, Carrickhill, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Holy Sites & Wells
Somewhere beneath the road-siding along the shoreline at Carrickhill, County Dublin, a holy well has been quietly erased from the landscape.
Known as Tobermaclaney, it was carefully recorded on the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey Ireland six-inch map, shown sitting within a small square-shaped field roughly twelve metres southwest of the Carrick martello tower. Today there are no surface remains whatsoever; the well has been buried under the road margin, and the only way to know it ever existed is to consult the old maps or the folklore record.
The well's disappearance has a fairly precise cause. The construction of a pier associated with the nearby martello tower, one of a series of squat circular fortifications built along the Irish coast in the early nineteenth century as a defence against a potential Napoleonic invasion, disturbed the site and effectively sealed it. An Ordnance Survey record from 1830, cited in Bolton et al. (2012), captured the well's character just before this disruption took hold: water from Tobermaclaney ran down the hillside, collecting into two small pools beside the tower before continuing on to the sea at the curved stone pier. It is a small but specific detail that makes the loss feel oddly concrete. Caoimhín Ó Danachair, the folklore scholar and photographer, noted the well's absence in 1958, by which point it had already vanished from the surface, and his photographs of the area, taken around that time, are held in the National Folklore Collection at UCD and accessible through the Dúchas archive online.
There is nothing to see at the site in the conventional sense, and a visitor should arrive knowing that. The interest lies in the gap between the 1830 description and the present shoreline, the way a small water source that once threaded visibly down to the sea has been absorbed entirely into coastal infrastructure. The martello tower itself, designated DU012-040, still stands nearby and gives a physical reference point for locating the approximate area of the well. The Dúchas photographs, accessible at duchas.ie, offer the closest thing to a view of the landscape as it appeared when the well's memory was still just about alive.