Saint Columbkille's Holy Wells, Boherduff, Co. Galway

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Holy Sites & Wells

Saint Columbkille’s Holy Wells, Boherduff, Co. Galway

In the north-east corner of a graveyard in Boherduff, two small stone-walled wells sit side by side, joined together yet distinct in shape, one oval and one roughly rectangular.

Holy wells are a familiar feature of the Irish landscape, traditionally associated with a local saint and visited for healing or devotion, often on the saint's feast day. What makes this pair quietly arresting is not their scale, which is modest, but their precise, almost deliberate pairing, and the weight of the surrounding landscape pressing in on them.

Both wells are dedicated to Saint Columbkille, the sixth-century monk and scholar who founded the monastery at Iona and whose cult spread widely across Ireland. They appear by name on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which gives some sense of how established their identity was in the nineteenth century. The northerly well is oval in plan, measuring roughly 1.36 metres by 1.15 metres and reaching down about 1.2 metres; the southern one is somewhat smaller and subrectangular. Each is defined by a low enclosing wall. Both are now overgrown with brambles and trees, which is not unusual for wells whose active devotional life has faded. About ten metres to the east lies a children's burial ground, known in Irish tradition as a cillín, a place set aside for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground. The proximity of the wells, the church remains, the graveyard, and the cillín makes this a remarkably layered site, where several strands of religious and social practice have accumulated in a very small area.

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