Holy well, Coolnaha, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Holy Sites & Wells
A small rectangular pool, roughly four metres by two, sits in a natural hollow in a Mayo pasture, fed by a spring that has likely been drawing people to this spot for centuries.
The well is enclosed today by a post and wire fence, its water choked with pond weed, and a field drain carries the overflow westward into planted forestry. It is an easy place to overlook, and that quality of quiet neglect is itself part of what makes it worth attention.
The well appears on the 1916 Ordnance Survey six-inch map under the name Tubberthana, a phonetic rendering of the Irish tobar, meaning well, combined with a personal or saint's name now difficult to pin down with certainty. What the map could not easily convey is the density of early medieval remains gathered around it. Some twenty metres to the north-west, a ridge carries an ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular boundary that would once have marked out sacred or monastic ground. Within that enclosure sits a ringfort, a circular earthwork of the type widely associated with early Irish farming settlements and high-status households, as well as a children's burial ground and a bullaun stone. Bullaun stones are boulders or rocks with one or more cup-shaped hollows ground into them; they appear frequently near early Christian sites and holy wells, and the water that collects in them was often considered to carry curative or protective properties. To find all four features clustered together above a single well suggests that this corner of Coolnaha held considerable local significance across a long period.