Holy well, Coolaghmore, Co. Kilkenny

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Holy Sites & Wells

Holy well, Coolaghmore, Co. Kilkenny

In a field associated with a long-vanished churchyard in Coolaghmore, County Kilkenny, there is a holy well that nobody can pinpoint with any certainty.

It has a name, a dedicated feast day, and a recorded tradition of communal gathering, yet its precise location has been lost. That combination of documented practice and physical obscurity makes it quietly peculiar, even by the standards of Irish holy wells, which are numerous enough that some inevitably slip through the cracks of memory.

The well is recorded under the Irish name Tobar an chillín, meaning the little church well, a name that ties it directly to the churchyard field in which it sits. A pattern, the Irish term for a traditional gathering held at a sacred site on the feast day of its patron saint, was observed here on the first Sunday in September. Patterns could involve prayer, procession, and, in earlier centuries, music and dancing; they were a persistent form of local religious life that survived well into the nineteenth century and occasionally beyond. The sole published reference to this well comes from O'Kelly, writing in 1985, who noted both its name and the pattern without recording exactly where within the field it could be found. Whether the pattern continued past that point, or had already faded by then, is not made clear.

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