Saint Bridget's Well, Trimmer, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Holy Sites & Wells

Saint Bridget’s Well, Trimmer, Co. Wexford

In a cereal field near Trimmer in County Wexford, a holy well dedicated to Saint Bridget exists almost entirely on paper.

There is nothing to see at ground level, no stonework, no votive offerings, no trickle of water visible to the eye. The well survives chiefly because cartographers thought it worth marking, twice, on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1839 and 1940, both times in gothic lettering, the typographic convention historically reserved for antiquities and places of religious significance.

A holy well pattern, the traditional annual gathering for prayer, music, and sometimes festivity held at a sacred water source on a saint's feast day, was once a common feature of Irish rural life. By around 1840, however, the scholar John O'Donovan, travelling through the area and collecting place-name and folklore evidence for the Ordnance Survey, could find no local memory of any pattern ever having been observed here. The well had apparently already slipped from active devotional use before he arrived to ask about it. It sits in a low, level landscape, with a small stream running roughly south to north about fifteen metres to the west, and the site of Saint Bridget's church lies approximately 120 metres to the south-southeast, close enough to suggest that well and church once formed part of the same religious complex, as was common in early Christian Ireland.

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