Penitential station, Gowlanes, Co. Kerry

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Holy Sites & Wells

Penitential station, Gowlanes, Co. Kerry

Just below Windy Gap, near the summit of Eagles Hill in County Kerry, there is a small holy well with an elongated stone lying beside it.

The stone is not decorative or accidental; it was placed there specifically to be picked up, pressed to a carved slab, and used to trace the sign of the cross. The slab itself, roughly forty centimetres by twenty, carries an incised cross with a smaller cross cut into each of its four angles. This is not a ruin in the conventional sense. It is a site that was actively used, with objects arranged for a purpose, and it retains that quality of quiet readiness even now.

The well is known locally as Tobar Na Bearnan, and it served as the final station of the Kilcrohane turas, a word meaning a devotional circuit or pilgrimage in which participants move between a prescribed series of sacred stops, performing prayers and ritual actions at each one. This particular turas was held in late July or early August, and the well at Eagles Hill was where the journey ended. Its waters were believed to cure eye conditions, a reputation recorded by Ó Suilleabháin in 1945. The well sits on the south-eastern side of a low cairn built from slabs and quartz, the white quartz perhaps deliberate, as quartz has long been associated with sacred sites across Ireland. The combination of the carved slab, the purpose-made tracing stone, and the healing well at the top of a mountain pilgrimage route gives the place a layered quality, part Christian devotion, part something considerably older in its logic.

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