Inscribed stone, Rosserk, Co. Mayo

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Stone Monuments

Inscribed stone, Rosserk, Co. Mayo

Set into the southern gable of a small stone well house near Rosserk in County Mayo, a carved Latin inscription has been slowly losing its legibility for over three centuries.

The stone itself predates the structure around it by more than a hundred years, which gives the whole arrangement an unusual quality: the well house was built to shelter something already considered worth preserving, and the older stone was folded into the new fabric rather than displaced. Holy wells in Ireland were frequently associated with apparitions or miraculous events, and the tradition attached to this one holds that the Blessed Virgin appeared here, lending the site a particular devotional weight that clearly persisted across generations.

The inscription was commissioned in August 1684 by a Father Moriartus Crehn, and its Latin text invokes God Almighty, the Most Blessed Virgin conceived without sin, and all the saints of the heavenly court. When the well house was constructed in 1789, the stone was incorporated into its facade, presumably because it was already regarded as integral to the place. By 1838, when Ordnance Survey officers were travelling the country compiling their detailed local letters, the inscription was noted and transcribed, though even then it was beginning to wear. That transcription, published later by O'Flanagan, preserves a reading of the full text that the stone itself can no longer reliably provide. What survives on the stone today is only partly legible, the letters softened and effaced by exposure over more than three hundred years.

The well house sits with the inscribed stone visible on its southern gable wall. The inscription's surface condition means close attention is needed to make out the remaining letters, and the 1838 transcription is a useful guide to what was once there: "In honorum Dei omnipotentis. Beatissimae Virginis / Sine labe concepta et omnium sanctorum celestis / Curia me fieri fecit Pater Moriartus Crehn / Aug + 30 + 1684."

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