Lady's Well, Ballingly, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Holy Sites & Wells
Along the wooded valley of the Corock River in County Wexford, a holy well sits hidden on a steep scarp, invisible from ground level.
It does not announce itself. There is no worn path of devotion, no cluster of votive offerings, no lingering sense of pilgrimage. By the time anyone thought to document it formally, even the memory of its Pattern day had dissolved.
Holy wells dedicated to Our Lady were once focal points of community devotion across Ireland, with annual Pattern days combining religious observance and local gathering. This one appeared on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1839 and 1925, marked both times in the gothic lettering cartographers reserved for antiquities and places of note. The scholar and topographer John O'Donovan, writing around 1840 as part of his extensive fieldwork for the Ordnance Survey, noted the well but found it already long abandoned. No one he spoke to could recall when the Pattern had last been observed, or even which day of the calendar it had once fallen on. That detail, published later in O'Flanagan's 1933 edited collection of O'Donovan's letters, fixes the well in a particular kind of Irish historical limbo: documented, named, mapped, and yet already forgotten within living memory of the mapping.
The well lies at the base of an east-facing slope in the valley of the Corock River, a river that runs broadly north to south through this part of Wexford. A stream of the meandering river passes about fifty metres to the west. The site is set into a steep, wooded scarp, and because it is not visible at ground level, a visitor standing nearby might have no idea it was there at all.