Holy well, Kilmihil (Coshlea By.), Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Holy Sites & Wells
Some holy wells in Ireland are surrounded by rags tied to nearby trees, worn paths from generations of pilgrims, and living memory of patron days celebrated well into the twentieth century.
This one in Kilmihil, in the barony of Coshlea in County Limerick, has almost none of that. What survives is essentially a name, and a brief annotation in an old survey notebook describing it simply as a blessed well, without ceremony or elaboration.
The folklorist and scholar Caoimhín Ó Danachair recorded the site in 1955, drawing on the Ordnance Survey Name Books compiled around 1840, which give its name as Tobermihil on the period map, and note the local form as Tubberveeheel, understood to mean St Michael's Well. The tobar element is the Irish word for well, and wells dedicated to the Archangel Michael are not uncommon across the country, often associated with high ground or prominent landscape features. What Ó Danachair found notable enough to record was precisely the absence of anything further: no patron feast, no pattern day, no cure attributed to the water, no legend attached to the figure of Michael. The note reads simply, "No tradition has survived." Whether the tradition was lost gradually through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or was never strongly established to begin with, the record does not say.
The well sits within the Coshlea barony, a rural stretch of south County Limerick. Because the documentary record is so sparse, visitors should approach with modest expectations in terms of visible heritage infrastructure. There is no formal signage or interpretation on site, and the physical fabric of the well itself may be unassuming. The value here is of a quieter kind: a place that appears in the historical record chiefly as a gap, a named thing whose meaning has slipped away. For anyone interested in the archaeology of belief and forgetting, that absence is itself worth noting.
