Saint Ivers Well, Rock Big, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Holy Sites & Wells

Saint Ivers Well, Rock Big, Co. Wicklow

Between the 1838 and 1885 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a holy well in County Wicklow quietly ceased to exist.

The earlier map marks it confidently as St. Ivers Well; the later one notes only "St. Iver's Well Site of", a cartographic shrug that signals the well had been filled in during the intervening decades. Today, what survives on level ground at Rock Big is a concrete-shored structure supplying a nearby farm, a functional object stripped of whatever physical character the original well once had.

The well carries a shifting cluster of names, each one a small puzzle. Ordnance Survey fieldworkers in the late 1830s recorded it as St. Iver's or Divers Well, and noted that people had formerly bathed in it seeking a cure for palsy. By the time schoolchildren in Arklow were collecting local folklore in the mid-twentieth century, the name had shifted again to St. Ibar's Well, possibly a corrupted form of the same saint or a local conflation with the early Irish bishop Ibar of Wexford. The folklore collected from Arklow National School added a further layer: the site was believed locally to have been part of an early Danish monastery, and a nearby graveyard, roughly a hundred metres to the south-east at Ballinbanoge, was still being visited by people praying for the dead within living memory at the time of collection. The Ordnance Survey Field Name Books were blunter in their assessment, recording that the well had "no recourse to it for some time" and was "covered with weeds and dirt", a description that speaks more to neglect than to any deliberate suppression of practice.

What remains is a place that has lost most of its legible history in layers, first when the well was filled, then when the concrete went in and erased whatever features may have surrounded it. The association with the nearby church and graveyard at Ballinbanoge is plausible but unconfirmed, and the saint behind the name remains genuinely unclear. It is the kind of site that rewards attention precisely because so little of it is tidy.

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