Holy well, Castletown, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Holy Sites & Wells

Holy well, Castletown, Co. Kilkenny

A concrete post holding a long-handled cup might seem an incongruous sight beside an ancient stone-lined well, yet at Kilkieran holy well on the lower slope of Kilmacoliver Hill it makes a quiet kind of sense.

Pilgrims still come here to drink, just as they presumably did when this site was bound up with an early medieval monastic community. The well sits about twenty-five metres east of Kilkeran graveyard, on a south-facing hillside that looks out over the valley of the River Suir, and its modest dimensions, roughly circular, less than a metre across and just over a metre deep, give little away about the age of the tradition it represents.

The well was recorded by the historian William Carrigan in 1905, who named it Tubber-Killkeerawin, an anglicisation of the Irish meaning Kilkieran's well, and noted its connection to the early medieval monastery of Kilkieran and its associated church nearby. Carrigan also drew attention to what he called a holy water font beside the well, which is in fact a bullaun stone, a large boulder or slab with one or more cup-shaped hollows ground into it, a type of stone feature found widely at early ecclesiastical sites in Ireland and often associated with ritual or healing use. The well itself is carefully constructed, stone-lined and opening to the south through two large flat slab steps, with the spring water flowing southward beneath them. A semi-circular area to the north and east has been revetted with curving stone walling, giving the whole a sense of deliberate enclosure rather than casual accumulation.

The well is easy to overlook if you are not specifically looking for it, sitting as it does just outside the boundary of the graveyard rather than within it. The bullaun stone Carrigan mentioned lies close by, and together the two features offer a fairly rare glimpse of the kind of small sacred landscape, well, stone, church, and burial ground, that clustered around early Irish monasteries and persisted in local memory long after the monasteries themselves fell out of use.

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