Holy well, Scardan Beg, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Holy Sites & Wells

Holy well, Scardan Beg, Co. Sligo

Three holy wells in close proximity, all sitting in poorly draining lowland in Scardan Beg, County Sligo, might seem like devotional abundance.

What complicates the picture is that the cartographers who mapped the area could not quite agree on which well was which. The site in question sits roughly 110 metres west-north-west of St. Patrick's Well, and its identity has shifted between two Ordnance Survey editions in a way that raises questions about whether the wells were ever clearly distinguished by the people who used them, or whether the mapmakers simply imposed names as best they could.

The 1837 edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map labels this well as St. Brigid's Well, placing that designation some 110 metres to the east-south-east. By the 1940 edition, the same well is recorded as Lady Well, a name that in Irish tradition often refers to the Virgin Mary rather than to any individual female saint. Holy wells dedicated to Brigid and to Our Lady occupy overlapping territory in Irish popular religion, and the two figures were sometimes conflated in local practice, which may account for some of the confusion. Whether the name changed because local usage shifted, or because a later surveyor simply recorded a different oral account, is not clear from what survives.

What is certain is that very little does survive. The ground to the north-east of the well has been raised in recent times with hardcore, and no physical remains of the well itself were identified when the site was examined. The low-lying, poorly draining land around it remains, as does the proximity to its two companion wells, but the site itself has effectively been erased, leaving the discrepant map names as the most tangible evidence that something was once considered worth recording here.

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