Holy well, Dromtarriff, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Holy Sites & Wells

Holy well, Dromtarriff, Co. Cork

A small well in a north Cork pasture, barely a metre across, draws visitors who press coins into the bark of a nearby tree and tie rags to its branches.

This is St Iníon Buí's holy well, set about two hundred metres southeast of Dromtarriff church and graveyard, and the tree beside it carries the quiet, accumulated weight of generations of votive offerings. The well itself is circular, stone-lined, and stone-covered, with an opening on the southeast side and four steps leading down into it. By 1934, when a local account recorded the site, there were three trees here, with a large mound of stones built up at the base of one of them.

The well is dedicated to St Iníon Buí, whose name translates roughly as "yellow daughter" or "fair daughter" in Irish. According to Ó Ríordáin, writing in 1986, she was the sister of St Latiaran and St Lasair, figures associated with early Irish Christianity in the region. Holy wells in Ireland were frequently linked to local saints of this kind, often women whose cults survived in folk practice long after their formal ecclesiastical commemoration had faded. The primary pattern day, when devotees would walk prescribed circuits, or "rounds", around the well, falls on the 6th of May. Bowman, writing in 1934, also recorded rounds on the 29th, 30th, and 31st of May, and on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays throughout the year, suggesting the site was in regular, not merely annual, use. Grove White, writing in the early twentieth century, noted that the well was said to hold a particular cure for sore eyes, a claim that appears in local tradition across several such sites in Munster.

The well appears by name on both the 1842 and 1904 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, confirming its recognised status across at least two centuries of recorded landscape. More recently, a circular stone wall with a gate to the south has been built to enclose the area, and the ground inside has been partially paved, suggesting the site continues to be tended and visited.

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