Holy well, Curradonohoe, Co. Cork

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Holy Sites & Wells

Holy well, Curradonohoe, Co. Cork

What looks, at first glance, like a series of worn hollows in a shelf of exposed bedrock near Castletownbere turns out to be something considerably more layered.

On the southern edge of a rocky ridge in an area known as Glebe, in the townland of Curradonohoe, a cluster of three, possibly four, circular depressions has long been known locally as the Holy Wells. They are heavily overgrown now, and there is little sign of active devotion, but the name has stuck, carrying the quiet implication of a ritual life that once gathered here.

The hollows are almost certainly natural in origin, shaped by geology rather than by hand. They sit roughly eight metres east of the graveyard surrounding the ruined church of Kilaconenagh, a proximity that would have made the association with sanctity feel entirely natural to earlier communities, who frequently grouped holy wells, burial grounds, and early church sites into a single sacred landscape. The three main hollows vary slightly in size, ranging from around half a metre to just over a metre across, and between two and four centimetres in depth, with a possible fourth hollow sitting approximately a metre higher up the same face of bedrock. Whether that upper depression ever featured in local devotional practice is unclear, but its position gives the site an unusual vertical as well as horizontal arrangement.

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