Holy well, Nohaval, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Holy Sites & Wells
Sitting in a pasture in Nohaval, Co. Cork, this open well is easy to overlook until you notice the stone slab set into its northwest side.
Pilgrims have carved into it five simple crosses, a large central cross with a smaller one lodged in each of its four angles, leaving a quiet record of repeated devotion that no official inscription could replicate. A single cup rests beside the well, practical and unadorned, and the overflow runs quietly away to the southwest. The well has carried two names across the ordnance maps: on the 1842 six-inch survey it appears as "Flugh Feigh", while the 1904 and 1938 editions record it as "St Finnian's Well", the dedication pointing toward one of the early Irish monastic saints whose name attached itself to springs and churches across the country.
The well is the final station of a pattern, the Irish term for a devotional gathering at a sacred site, typically involving prescribed circuits or "rounds" on a saint's feast day. Here the pattern runs across three days in December, the 11th, 12th, and 13th, as documented by Ó Driscéoil writing in 1934. The first two days are spent paying rounds at the ruins of the old church in Nohoval graveyard, roughly a mile to the south, and only on the third day, the 13th of December, do participants make their way to the well itself. The procession moves from burial ground to water source, following a sequence that has its roots in pre-Reformation practice and survived, in various forms, into the twentieth century at least.
The well lies towards the eastern side of a field still used as pasture, so any visit involves negotiating working farmland. The carved slab is the detail worth looking for closely, the geometry of those crosses cut by successive hands over an unknown span of years, uneven and plainly made, which gives them a different quality from anything professionally inscribed.