Saint Peter's Well, Cuilmore, Co. Galway

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Holy Sites & Wells

Saint Peter’s Well, Cuilmore, Co. Galway

The village of Peterswell in County Galway takes its name from this spring, yet the well itself sits quietly at the centre of the settlement in a state of modest formality that sets it apart from the more rugged holy wells found scattered across the Irish countryside.

Rather than a simple stone-lined hollow in a field, this is a proper wellhouse, with mortared rubble limestone walls and a pitched roof of flagstones, the whole thing sealed behind a short iron gate. It has the bearing of a piece of minor civic architecture, the kind of thing a prosperous nineteenth-century parishioner might commission to mark a place already considered sacred.

The cut-stone lintel above the square-headed doorway carries the inscription "Dermot Donelan of Sylane 1840", which places the construction of the present structure firmly in the pre-Famine period. Donelan, presumably a local man of some means from the townland of Sylane, gave the well its current, rather composed form. Inside, modern guard rails now ring the well itself. Look up toward the roof and you will notice two pairs of putlog-holes, small square recesses set into opposing walls, the kind of socket left behind when the timber poles used to support scaffolding during construction are removed. Their survival here is a small, readable trace of how the building went up. The well is fed by a stream that seems to vanish roughly five metres to the south-west of the wellhouse, though it likely continues flowing beneath the ground before surfacing inside.

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