Saint Michael's Well, Bush, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Holy Sites & Wells

Saint Michael’s Well, Bush, Co. Wexford

Some holy wells in Ireland survive as pilgrimage sites, ringed by votive offerings and tended by local communities.

This one near Bush in County Wexford no longer exists at all. The ground where it once sat, roughly forty metres south-west of the local graveyard on a flat, low-lying stretch of land, has been built over entirely. Nothing marks the spot.

The well appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1839 and 1840, labelled in gothic lettering as St. Michael's Well, which suggests it was considered a place of some local significance at the time of the first systematic mapping of the country. The antiquarian John O'Donovan, writing around 1840, recorded that a pattern had been held there each year on the 29th of September, the feast day of St. Michael the Archangel. A pattern, in Irish popular religious practice, was a gathering at a sacred site, typically involving prescribed circuits, prayers, and often a degree of communal celebration that could make the clergy uneasy. This one had already been suppressed by the time O'Donovan made his notes, having been discontinued around 1830. The dedication to St. Michael places the well within a very old strand of Christian devotion; veneration of the archangel as a warrior figure and leader of the heavenly host developed from the fourth century onward and was widespread across Europe by the sixth. That a rural Wexford well should bear his name is less surprising than it might seem, given how thoroughly his cult embedded itself in local religious geography across the continent and later in Ireland.

There is no visible trace of the well today, and given that the site has been built over, a visit would yield nothing beyond the knowledge of what once occupied that unremarkable patch of ground beside the graveyard.

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