Saint Catherine's Well, Cousinstown, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Holy Sites & Wells
In a slight valley near Cousinstown in County Wexford, a holy well dedicated to St. Catherine of Alexandria has almost entirely vanished.
It appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1839 and 1940, named in gothic lettering on each edition, which suggests it was considered a place of some local significance well into the twentieth century. Yet by the time the later map was produced, the pattern, the traditional annual gathering of prayer and ritual once held at the well, had already been forgotten for roughly a hundred and forty years. Today there are no visible remains, the site lying somewhere beneath a cereal crop.
The scholar John O'Donovan, writing around 1840, recorded that the pattern had been observed on the 25th of November until approximately 1800, and that date is itself revealing. The 25th of November is the feast day of St. Catherine of Alexandria, a fourth-century figure whose story is among the more dramatic in early Christian tradition. According to hagiographic accounts, she was a learned woman who converted a group of pagan philosophers to Christianity, and when her persecutors attempted to execute her on a spiked breaking wheel, the device miraculously shattered; she is represented with a wheel in iconography for precisely this reason. Her relics were said to have been discovered in Egypt in the eighth century and translated to the monastery at Mount Sinai, which still stands. When portions of those relics reached Europe in the eleventh century, her cult spread widely, and dedications to her became common across Ireland and Britain. The Roman Catholic Church removed her from its calendar in 1969, citing uncertainty about the historical record, but restored her in 2002.
The well's disappearance into farmland is not unusual for this class of site; many Irish holy wells survive only as place-names or map annotations once the living tradition around them fades. What makes this one worth noting is the precision of O'Donovan's observation: he could already describe the pattern in the past tense, meaning the community connection had broken within living memory of his writing, quietly extinguished sometime around the turn of the nineteenth century.