Holy well, Kilclogh, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Holy Sites & Wells

Holy well, Kilclogh, Co. Cork

A small stone enclosure on the south side of a road in Kilclogh, mid Cork, marks the site of a holy well that has quietly outlasted its own ritual purpose.

The low wall surrounding it is still intact, but the devotional life it once contained has long since faded, leaving behind a structure that is easier to categorise than to explain.

Holy wells were focal points for a form of localised Catholic and pre-Christian observance practised widely across Ireland, involving a circuit of prayers known as "rounds" walked in a prescribed pattern around the well, often on a saint's feast day. At Kilclogh, that tradition is documented but extinct. Writing in 1939, a researcher named Hartnett recorded that rounds had been paid at the well "in the olden days, but not within living memory", a phrase that places the end of active use somewhere well back into the nineteenth century or earlier. By the time anyone thought to write it down, the practice had already passed out of the knowledge of the living.

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Pete F
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