Holy well, Tulla, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Holy Sites & Wells
A narrow, curvilinear passage, barely wide enough in places for one person to pass through, leads down a hillslope to a small lintelled recess set into a rubble stone wall.
This is St Mochulla's Well, or Tobar Mhochulla, tucked at the edge of a laneway in County Clare where three field boundaries converge. It sits on a south-east-facing slope, enclosed by vegetation dense enough to cut off any wider view, and the ground behind the well stays waterlogged year-round, pointing to the natural spring that presumably drew people here in the first place. The pool at the base of the rectangular recess, just under a metre high and barely half a metre deep, appears stagnant now, which adds a quiet strangeness to a structure that has otherwise been carefully maintained and renovated in relatively recent times.
The well sits roughly 45 metres south of an ecclesiastical enclosure that accumulated layers of use over many centuries, incorporating a medieval church, an early eighteenth-century church, a graveyard, and a castle site. That castle, Tulla Castle, may have contributed some of the stonework now incorporated into the well itself. Several of the cut stones lining the entrance passage and forming the steps down into the well area are chamfered, punch dressed, and finished with drafted margins, the kind of precise dressing associated with medieval dressed stonework rather than vernacular rubble construction, suggesting deliberate reuse of material from the nearby complex. A cross-slab has been affixed to the enclosing wall beside the well recess, and a modern Celtic cross sits above it on the wall's coping. Writing in 1913, the antiquarian T. J. Westropp counted no fewer than fifteen holy wells in the vicinity of Tulla, and this well, given its position directly adjacent to the ecclesiastical complex, is almost certainly among the group he recorded.
The well is signposted in front of the old National School in Tulla as Tobar Mhochulla, which provides the clearest starting point for finding it. The approach passage narrows considerably at its tightest point, opening out into a wider U-shaped area just before the recess itself, where steps compensate for the fall in the hillside. A large conifer at the entrance to the passage has been accommodated rather than removed, the enclosing wall built to respect it, which gives some indication of how the site has been adapted and cared for over time.