Saint Patrick's Well, Miskaun Glebe, Co. Leitrim

Co. Leitrim |

Holy Sites & Wells

Saint Patrick’s Well, Miskaun Glebe, Co. Leitrim

There is a well in County Leitrim that the Ordnance Survey cartographers of 1835 recorded simply as a fort.

The label was not entirely wrong. The site sits within a roughly circular natural hollow, about thirty metres across, enclosed by an earthen bank planted with deciduous trees along its western, northern, and eastern edges, with a stream running north to south along its outer flank. It reads less like a holy well than like an outdoor room, self-contained and oddly formal, which may be why the early mapmakers reached for the word they did.

What stands here now is a concrete well, practical and modern, but it replaced an earlier circular drystone structure, around a metre in diameter, that once sat beneath a rag tree to the west. A rag tree, sometimes called a clootie tree, is a tree hung with strips of cloth or other small offerings left by people seeking cures or intercession, a practice that continues at holy wells across Ireland and predates Christianity by a considerable margin. The older stone well is gone, though the site to the east still holds the remains of a rectangular drystone structure measuring roughly 1.1 metres by 0.9 metres, a second well or perhaps an associated feature. The layering here is characteristic of these places, where the functional and the devotional have been quietly rebuilt over centuries without anyone making a great event of it.

A path leads in from a public road to the east, and the pattern, the traditional gathering of prayer and ritual observance held at a holy well on its patron day, still takes place on the 17th of March. That the day is Saint Patrick's Day is no coincidence, and the continuity of the practice at a site this modest is worth noting. The perimeter bank is cut at the north-east by a road bank, so the enclosure is no longer perfectly intact, but enough of its original shape survives to give the hollow its distinctive, sheltered character.

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