Saint Patrick's Well, Longford, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Holy Sites & Wells
Some holy wells fade gradually from devotional life; this one in Longford, County Galway had already been written off by the time the first large-scale Ordnance Survey maps were being drawn up.
By 1838, the year surveyors recorded its name on the six-inch OS map, local memory held that the well was "fast losing its sanctity", a phrase preserved in the OS Letters compiled by John O'Flanagan. That the mapmakers bothered to name it at all suggests it had once carried real significance, even as its ritual life was quietly ending.
By 1984, when the site was physically inspected, no surface trace of the well itself remained. What survives is a low, roughly oval mound of loose field-clearance stones, measuring approximately eight metres east to west and six metres north to south, and rising only about twenty centimetres above the surrounding ground. The land has long since been reclaimed as pasture, and the mound is less a monument than a coincidence of discarded fieldstone. Immediately to its east, however, lies a bullaun stone, a large rock bearing one or more deliberately hollowed depressions, likely used for grinding or perhaps for collecting water regarded as curative or sacred. Bullaun stones are found across Ireland and are frequently associated with early ecclesiastical sites and holy wells, suggesting this place had a longer and more layered history than the nineteenth-century dismissal of its sanctity might imply. The well still appeared by name on the 1946 edition of the six-inch OS map, decades after any active devotion had apparently ceased, a cartographic habit of recording what was already gone.