Holy well, Monbay, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Holy Sites & Wells
A small covered spring on a south-facing slope in County Wexford carries an association so improbable that it reads almost like a clerical error.
According to a local record from 1940, the well was blessed by a Father Vladimir Pecherin, and was said to offer a cure for toothache. That detail alone would be unremarkable enough, were it not for who Pecherin actually was: a Ukrainian-born intellectual, trained as a Russian Orthodox priest, who became a professor of Greek language and antiquities at Moscow University in 1835, left Russia the following year, converted to Catholicism in 1840, joined the Redemptorist Order at Clapham in London, then eventually resigned from the Order in 1862 and settled in Dublin as a chaplain at the Mater Hospital. He spent his later years embroiled in controversies, and his memoirs were sharply critical of both the Russian government and the Roman Catholic Church. That this restless, combative figure, born in 1807 and dead in 1885, should have his name attached to an unnamed holy well on a Wexford hillside is the kind of biographical wrinkle that resists easy explanation.
The well itself is a natural spring set beside a low rock outcrop roughly a metre high. Its stream runs south-east into a small boggy area known as Bohernisighe, an anglicisation of Bóthar na Sí, meaning the fairies' road. That waterlogged hollow was once part of a laneway leading to a house visible on the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, though no trace of that building appears to survive. The well was recorded as a covered holy well on the 1940 edition of the same map series, but by the time it was examined in recent decades, no evidence of active veneration remained, and local memory of it had faded entirely. A standing stone lies nearby, a reminder that this corner of the Wexford landscape has accumulated layers of use and meaning over a very long period. The well's name, if it ever had one distinct from Pecherin's, was never recorded.
