Saint Nicholas's Well, An Baile Dubh, Co. Kerry

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Holy Sites & Wells

Saint Nicholas’s Well, An Baile Dubh, Co. Kerry

The well is dry now, and has been for some time, its water long since redirected to drain the surrounding field.

What remains is a shallow depression in the ground and a small, loose slab of stone, thin enough to seem almost incidental, measuring roughly half a metre by a third. On one face, someone at some point carved a Latin cross with T-bar terminals at the head and each arm. The slab once stood upright about two and a half metres to the west of the well; now it lies flat on the surface, dislodged from its original position. The site is in the townland of Liscarney, in the parish of Ballyduff, on a hillslope above Brandon Bay in County Kerry.

The well was dedicated to Saint Nicholas, patron of Ballyduff Parish, and on his feast day, the 6th of December, it drew large numbers of people. The practice observed here was a turas, a traditional Irish penitential circuit of a sacred site, in which pilgrims walked the perimeter of the field three times from right to left while reciting the Rosary. That field, still known as Páirc an Turasa, the field of the journey, measures roughly 120 by 80 yards. People came particularly for ailments of the eyes, applying the water directly to the affected area. The water could be drunk at the site but, by custom, was never taken away. Pilgrims left small objects near the well when they departed. Folklore collected from Ballyduff School preserves a cautionary story about this prohibition: a local woman took some of the water home for household use and, when she poured it into a kettle, found a small trout swimming in it. The water refused to boil, and she was obliged to carry it back to the well and fetch fresh water from elsewhere. The trout, unexplained and uninvited, enforced the rule the community already kept.

The cross-inscribed stone, now lying loose beside the hollow where the water once pooled, is easy to overlook. The incised cross is simple, almost austere, and the slab itself is only six centimetres thick. The water that once fed the well now emerges again about a hundred metres downslope to the north, having been quietly redirected by agricultural drainage at some point in the past, leaving the old site intact in outline if no longer in function.

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