Saint Imock's Well, Craigue Little, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Holy Sites & Wells
A small rectangular hollow in the ground, fed by a pipe and enclosed in concrete, does not look much like a site of annual pilgrimage.
Yet this modest depression in the level farmland of Craigue Little in County Wexford was once the focus of a pattern, the traditional Irish gathering of prayer, socialising, and ritual that took place at holy wells on a saint's feast day. According to the nineteenth-century scholar John O'Donovan, writing around 1840, crowds came here every tenth of December until roughly 1800, when the custom appears to have quietly ceased.
The saint behind the well has a complicated name and a distant origin. The local forms, St. Imock or Shemoge, are corruptions derived from St. Díomán of Clonkeen in County Limerick. Díomán was an anchorite of the Céili Dé, a reform movement within the early Irish church that emerged in the eighth century and emphasised ascetic practice and communal discipline. His death is recorded in 811, and his feast day fell on the tenth of December, which is precisely when the pattern here was observed. How a Limerick anchorite came to be commemorated at a well in south Wexford is not documented, but the dedication survived long enough to leave its mark on the place name. A church associated with the same saint stands roughly 375 metres to the north, suggesting this corner of Wexford once held a more substantial cluster of early Christian memory than survives today.
The well itself is now a sunken rectangular area measuring roughly half a metre across and just under half a metre deep, supplied by a pipe running from a concrete cistern to the south-east. There is no surviving evidence of veneration, no offerings, no decorated stones, no trace of the rituals that once drew people here on a December morning. The stream that runs a short distance to the west is the only water still moving freely.