St, Nicholas Well, Cromwells Fort, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Holy Sites & Wells

St, Nicholas Well, Cromwells Fort, Co. Wexford

At the bottom of a steep, north-facing slope in a mature deciduous wood in County Wexford, there sits an abandoned concrete reservoir.

That, today, is all that remains of what Ordnance Survey cartographers twice saw fit to record, in gothic lettering, as St. Nicholas' Well, appearing on both the 1839 and 1941 editions of the six-inch map. There is no trace of an ancient well, no physical evidence of veneration, and no record of a pattern, the traditional Irish gathering of prayer and celebration held at a holy well on its patron saint's feast day. The site has been quietly absorbed by the landscape, its sacred character entirely effaced.

The well was dedicated to St. Nicholas of Myra, a fourth-century bishop from what is now Turkey, whose feast day falls on the 6th of December. He was celebrated in his own lifetime as a generous benefactor and miracle-worker, and his reputation as a gift-giver proved so enduring that much of the later character of Santa Claus was built upon it. How his name came to be attached to a spring on a wooded Wexford hillside is not recorded. Many Irish holy wells acquired their dedications through local tradition rather than any formal ecclesiastical process, and without a documented pattern or surviving folklore, the particular history of this one has been lost. The concrete reservoir, presumably installed at some point in the twentieth century to make practical use of the water source, completed what time had already started.

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