Holy Well, Tomcoyle Hill, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Holy Sites & Wells

Holy Well, Tomcoyle Hill, Co. Wexford

On a south-east-facing slope of Tomcoyle Hill in County Wexford, a small square enclosure of dry-laid stone, barely a metre across and a metre high, marks a well that was once the focus of an annual gathering.

A pattern, the Irish tradition of communal prayer and ritual at a sacred site on a saint's feast day, was held here every 8th September until 1798. That date, the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, points to the well's dedication, and the pattern would have drawn local people to pray, walk circuits of the site, and perhaps leave offerings. The well itself feeds a stream that flows away to the south-east, giving the place a quiet sense of continuity even now.

The well is known as Kilnenor Well, taking its name from the medieval parish of Kilnenor, whose church once stood within a graveyard roughly thirty metres to the north-east. The antiquarian John O'Donovan recorded the pattern tradition around 1840, noting that it had ceased in 1798, though he did not explain the reason for its ending. That year carries its own weight in Wexford history, and it is difficult not to connect the disruption of local custom with the upheaval of the 1798 rebellion. By 1940, according to the Ordnance Survey Field Memoirs, veneration at the well had stopped entirely. The rectangular drystone enclosure surrounding it, roughly 1.2 metres by 1.2 metres and standing about a metre tall, is a modest but deliberate piece of construction, the kind of careful walling that signals something worth protecting.

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