Holy well, Drishoge (Coolock By.), Co. Dublin

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Holy Sites & Wells

Holy well, Drishoge (Coolock By.), Co. Dublin

Somewhere beneath what was once a suburban kitchen floor in north Dublin, a spring kept quietly rising.

That spring is St. Catherine's Well, and its history is a small, odd story about how sacred water and domestic life can become thoroughly entangled. For a period, the natural source fed up through the ground into the kitchen of a house on Millbourne Avenue in the townland of Drishogue, before being channelled by a short culvert to the outside, where it emerged beneath a pointed arch of rough stonework. Visitors came not to admire the architecture but to treat sore eyes, toothache, and chincough, an older term for whooping cough, conditions that wells dedicated to healing saints were long credited with relieving across Ireland.

A 1928 account placed the well in the parish of Clonturk, noting that it lay on the north bank of the river Tolka and had been in traditional repute for curing these ailments for some time, though even then no annual pattern day, the communal gathering once held at holy wells to mark a saint's feast, had been observed within living memory. The well's unusual domestic setting, that combination of kitchen floor and culvert and pointed arch, made it memorable enough that the municipal authorities, when the house was eventually demolished, chose to preserve the well and its covering rather than simply clear the site. It was moved into an ornamental shrubbery, where it remains.

Today, the well sits within Griffith Park, roughly seventy metres north of the footbridge that crosses the Tolka. It lies along the park's main walking route, so it is easy enough to pass without noticing it, tucked as it is into the shrubbery rather than standing prominently. The covered structure, the remnant of that pointed arch superstructure from the Millbourne Avenue house, is what to look for. There is no pattern day, no seasonal ritual attached to it now, just the spring beneath and the stonework above, sitting quietly in a public park that most visitors cross without knowing what they are walking beside.

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