Saint Augustine's Well, Garrynagry, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Holy Sites & Wells

Saint Augustine’s Well, Garrynagry, Co. Clare

Six white-painted pebbles sit at the mouth of a small drystone well in County Clare, their careful arrangement suggesting that someone placed them there with intent rather than accident.

The well itself is modest, roughly ninety centimetres across, with a concrete structure built over its opening to shelter whatever offerings have accumulated inside. It sits at the foot of a west-facing slope, just beside a stream that runs from the south-east to the north-west, and it is enclosed within a rectangular hedge boundary that also contains several mature conifers. The gravel path that circles the well is slowly being reclaimed by vegetation, which gives the whole place the quiet, slightly marginal quality common to sites that are remembered but not maintained in any formal sense.

The well is dedicated to Saint Augustine, and locally it carries a reputation for curing eye complaints, a function associated with many Irish holy wells, where the act of visiting, praying, and sometimes bathing the affected part of the body in the water was understood as both devotional and medicinal. A pattern, the Irish term for a ritual gathering at a sacred site on a saint's feast day or another significant date, is said to take place here in September or October. Patterns typically involve prayers, rounds performed on foot around the well or enclosure, and sometimes the leaving of votive offerings; the concrete superstructure at this well appears to serve exactly that purpose. The hedge enclosure, measuring just over fourteen metres by twelve and a half, frames the well as a distinct and bounded sacred space, separated from the surrounding landscape in the way such sites traditionally were.

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