Holy well, St. Margarets, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Holy Sites & Wells
Most holy wells in Ireland carry a weight of folklore: rags tied to nearby branches, rounds walked at particular hours, cures attributed to particular saints.
St. Margaret's Well in County Wexford carries none of that. No pattern day is recorded, no offerings have been left, no tradition of veneration has ever been documented. It is simply a well that bears a saint's name and, beyond that, remains oddly quiet in the historical record.
What survives is the physical structure itself, and it is a neat piece of vernacular stonework. The well is circular, stone-lined, roughly 0.9 to 0.95 metres in diameter, and set into the western face of a field bank alongside a northwest-to-southeast road, with the seashore lying about 180 metres to the southeast. It opens to the west through a gap roughly half a metre wide and just over a metre high, and is capped by a single stone lintel measuring approximately 1.05 by 0.95 metres. An overflow channel runs southeast from the well toward a pond about 20 metres away, suggesting the structure was designed with some care for managing the water flow rather than serving purely as a devotional feature. St. Margaret's church stands roughly 300 metres to the north-northwest, which presumably explains the name, though the connection between the two sites remains undocumented. The well appears on the 1925 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, labelled in the italic lettering that cartographers of that period typically reserved for antiquities and features of note, but whether it was already old by then, or how long it had borne its current name, is not known.