Lady Well, Tellarought, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Holy Sites & Wells

Lady Well, Tellarought, Co. Wexford

On the southern side of a quiet road in Tellarought, County Wexford, a holy well sits on a gentle west-facing slope, its name rendered in gothic lettering on Ordnance Survey maps as far back as 1839.

That cartographic formality is one of the more lasting traces of the Lady Well's significance, because by the time anyone thought to write about it in detail, the place had already been quiet for a generation.

John O'Donovan, the Irish scholar and place-name authority who carried out extensive fieldwork for the Ordnance Survey around 1840, noted that the Lady Well lay roughly sixty yards south-west of a nearby church site. He also recorded that it had not functioned as a place of pilgrimage for approximately forty years, meaning the practice of visiting had likely faded sometime around the turn of the nineteenth century. Holy wells dedicated to "Our Lady" were widespread across Ireland, typically associated with Marian devotion and visited on fixed feast days as part of a pattern, the traditional circuit of prayers and ritual that gave such sites their social and spiritual life. When that pattern stops being observed, a well tends to disappear quickly from living memory, even if the cartographers continue to mark it. The 1924 Ordnance Survey edition shows it still named and located, a quiet persistence in ink.

The precise site today is less clear. There is no confirmed well beneath the car park beside the local Roman Catholic church, though St. Bridget's Well lies roughly ninety metres to the south-west, on the far side of a small stream running north-west to south-east. Whether the two sites share a deeper devotional relationship, or whether the proximity is simply geographical coincidence, the surviving record does not say.

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