Saint Bridget's Well, Culleen More, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Holy Sites & Wells
At the base of this holy well in Culleen More, sitting quietly in a field in County Westmeath, is a large circular limestone slab with a perforation at its centre, roughly 0.65 metres across.
It is an odd and ancient-looking thing, and it predates most of what surrounds it. Holy wells, traditionally associated with saints and believed to hold healing or spiritual power, were among the most persistent features of pre-Christian and early Christian devotion in Ireland, and this one is dedicated to Saint Bridget, one of Ireland's three patron saints. The well itself still retains water, which makes it something of a rarity among sites that have been as heavily altered as this one.
The well appears on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1837, already named as St Bridget's Well, which confirms it was a recognised site of devotion well into the nineteenth century. By 1976, when it was formally described, it had already been substantially modified, the original fabric largely obscured beneath more recent interventions. Since then it has been refurbished further, with the addition of pseudo-cross slabs, Stations of the Cross, and a small oratory built in the Gallarus style. The Gallarus Oratory in County Kerry is one of Ireland's best-known early medieval dry-stone structures, and its form has occasionally been borrowed in modern ecclesiastical construction, though the result at Culleen More is a recent interpretation rather than an ancient survival. About 35 metres to the east lies Kilbride graveyard, a proximity that is not coincidental. The place name Kilbride, from the Irish Cill Bhríde, meaning church of Bridget, ties the well, the graveyard, and the surrounding landscape together into a single devotional geography that has clearly endured across many centuries.