Holy well, Foher, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Holy Sites & Wells
Some places are most interesting for the fact that they have entirely ceased to exist.
About sixty metres south of Salrock church in Connemara, there was once a holy well known correctly as Tobar Salruc. Holy wells, traditionally associated with local saints or curative powers, were once a fixture of the Irish landscape, visited for prayer, healing, and seasonal ritual. This one has left no visible surface trace whatsoever, and what we know of it amounts to little more than a cartographic footnote.
The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the well as a present and presumably functioning feature. By the time the second edition was being prepared, something had changed. When that revised map appeared in 1896, the well's entry carried the telling prefix "Site of", the cartographer's quiet way of marking an absence. Whether the well had been filled in, dried up, or simply forgotten between surveys is not recorded. What remains is a named location without a location, a tobar, the Irish word for well, that survives only in the historical record and on an older sheet of paper.