Holy well, Corgerry Oughter, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Holy Sites & Wells
On the western bank of a small stream in Corgerry Oughter, County Galway, there is a holy well that can no longer be found.
The site is known locally by the name, and that local memory is now the most substantial thing remaining of it. The stream has been dredged at some point, and the work is thought to have destroyed the well entirely. No surface trace survives.
Holy wells in Ireland were typically natural springs or water sources associated with a saint or sacred figure, and they drew communities together for annual gatherings known as patterns, a word derived from the Irish word for patron. At Corgerry Oughter, the pattern fell on Lady's Day, the 15th of August, the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, a date that was one of the most widely observed in the Irish devotional calendar. Pilgrims would have come to the spot to pray, to walk prescribed circuits, and perhaps to leave votive offerings. Thirty metres to the north-west, a church and graveyard still occupy the same landscape, suggesting that this was once a cluster of sacred sites rather than an isolated curiosity. The well, the church, and the burial ground would have formed a coherent devotional geography, the kind that is common across the west of Ireland but which, in this case, has been quietly unmade by the ordinary mechanics of land drainage.