Saint John's Well, Ballyowen, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Holy Sites & Wells

Saint John’s Well, Ballyowen, Co. Wexford

A small circular enclosure on a south-facing slope in County Wexford holds the remnants of what was once a place of communal religious gathering, though you would struggle today to find any sign that people ever came here to pray.

Two roughly-dressed granite pillars, each standing just 0.8 metres high, mark a western entrance into a low earthen bank about ten metres across, with mature trees growing within. There is no well-house, no votive offerings, no worn stone where knees once rested. Whatever ritual life this place once had has long since drained away.

The site is dedicated to Saint John and sits in a gentle north-south valley fold near the Corock River in Ballyowen. It appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1839 and 1925, marked in gothic script on each edition, which suggests it was still considered a place of some note even when living memory of its use had faded. A pattern, the traditional Irish gathering at a holy well combining prayer, socialising, and often music or sport, was once held here annually, most likely on the feast of Saint John the Baptist on the 24th of June. The scholar John O'Donovan, writing around 1840, recorded that the pattern had been discontinued since 1798, the year of the United Rebellion in Wexford, though he does not specify whether the uprising itself was the direct cause of its ending. The connection between that violent year and the silencing of a local custom is left unspoken in the record, but it is difficult not to notice.

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