Holy well, Killeen, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Holy Sites & Wells

Holy well, Killeen, Co. Galway

On the eastern bank of the Abhainn Mhór, close to where the river drains out of Ballynahinch Lake in Connemara, a small stone-lined spring sits roughly seventy metres north of an old graveyard.

Its formal name is Tobar Feichín, a well dedicated to Saint Feichín, a seventh-century abbot associated with Fore in County Westmeath whose cult spread widely across the west of Ireland. What makes the well quietly remarkable is less its scale than its persistence: a natural spring enclosed within a drystone surround about one and a half metres in diameter, with a simple opening on the south side, it has the unassuming, functional appearance of something built to last without drawing attention to itself.

The well was recorded as early as 1684 by Roderic O'Flaherty, the Galway historian and geographer whose manuscript account of Connacht was later published by James Hardiman in 1846. That O'Flaherty thought it worth noting suggests it carried some local significance in the late seventeenth century, when veneration of holy wells, natural springs believed to possess curative or spiritual properties, remained woven into the religious landscape of the west of Ireland despite official discouragement. The drystone surround, built without mortar using the fitted-stone technique common throughout Connemara, is the kind of modest construction that tends to be repaired and maintained across generations rather than formally restored, which makes its age genuinely difficult to pin down.

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