Holy well, Rahoneen, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Holy Sites & Wells

Holy well, Rahoneen, Co. Kerry

In the townland of Rahoneen in north County Kerry, a holy well has vanished entirely from view.

No stone surround, no votive offerings, no damp hollow in the ground to betray its presence; the well has been completely covered over, leaving no surface trace whatsoever. It is, in the most literal sense, a place that can no longer be visited, only located.

The well's paper trail tells a quiet story of gradual forgetting. On the Ordnance Survey maps produced between 1841 and 1842, it was recorded simply as a circular enclosure, the kind of feature a surveyor might note without fully interpreting. By the time the revised OS maps were produced in 1897, it had acquired a name: Tobernahornach, a placename rooted in the Irish word tobar, meaning well. The name suggests the site carried some local significance well into the nineteenth century, even if that significance is now difficult to recover. Immediately to the south lies a univallate rath, a single-ditched ringfort of the kind built in early medieval Ireland as an enclosed farmstead or place of habitation. The proximity of a holy well to a rath is not unusual in the Irish landscape; the two features often cluster together, reflecting patterns of settlement and sacred geography that are centuries old. Whether any formal connection existed between this particular well and the adjacent rath is not recorded, but the pairing is suggestive.

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Pete F
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