Holy well, Tallaght, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Holy Sites & Wells
Somewhere in the townland of Tymon North, on the south-western edge of Dublin, a holy well was once deliberately poisoned by the man who owned the land around it, and the story of what happened next has never quite been finished.
The well, known locally as the Fairy Well, has not been precisely located by modern surveyors, and no physical trace of it has been confirmed. What survives instead is a cautionary tale, suspended mid-sentence, about the consequences of defying the popular reverence attached to such places.
Holy wells, found across Ireland in considerable numbers, were traditionally regarded as sites of curative or protective power, often associated with a patron saint or, as here, with the older language of fairy belief. The Ordnance Survey Letters of 1837 noted a small rise south of Tymon Castle called the Fairy Bank, and recorded that a very good well stood a little to its north. This is almost certainly the same well described later by Daly in 1957, who placed it on a piece of high ground between Tallaght and Balrothery, covered over, its position marked by an old thorn bush. Daly also preserved the story of a farmer named Ledwich who owned the surrounding ground. Irritated by visitors repeatedly breaking down his fences to reach the well, Ledwich ordered his workers to fill it with a cartload of slaughterhouse manure. Not one of them would comply. So he did it himself. The account of his punishment, as Daly recorded it, ends abruptly: his horse bolted on the way home, he was thrown from the cart, and his leg was, and there the sentence stops.
Because the well's exact position has never been established, there is nothing to visit in any conventional sense. The area around Tymon North has changed considerably since the nineteenth century, absorbed into the expanding suburbs of south Dublin. What the record offers instead is the outline of a landscape that once carried a different kind of meaning, where a thorn bush marked something significant, and where the local understanding of consequence was precise enough that no farmhand would lift a shovel against it. The incomplete sentence in Daly's account, whether by accident or editorial reticence, does its own quiet work.