Saint Bridget's Well, Ballynamona, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Holy Sites & Wells
Some places are most interesting for what has disappeared.
On the northern bank of the River Suir in County Tipperary, close to where a small stream cuts through a deep channel before joining the river, there is nothing left to see of what was once Saint Bridget's Well. No stonework, no votive offerings, no worn path. The ground simply runs flat to the river's edge, then drops sharply away.
Holy wells dedicated to Saint Bridget, the fifth-century abbess of Kildare whose cult blended with far older traditions of sacred water, were once scattered across Ireland in considerable numbers, and many served as focal points for local devotion and seasonal pattern days. This one in Ballynamona was recorded on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, which suggests it was still regarded as a functioning or at least recognised site at that time. By the 1907 edition of the same map, however, the designation had changed to "site of", a small but telling revision that marks the well's passage from living place to remembered one. Sometime in the intervening decades, the well ceased to be a well in any meaningful sense, leaving only its general location, near the confluence of that stream and the Suir, as a rough guide to where it once stood.