Sunday Well, Corragh, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Holy Sites & Wells
On an east-facing slope in Corragh, Co. Wexford, a lone whitethorn tree marks the approximate location of a holy well that has been slowly disappearing into the hillside for the better part of two centuries.
The well sits towards the bottom of the slope, and soil creep, the gradual downhill movement of surface earth, has been steadily burying it. What was once a place of local religious observance is now little more than a faint trace beneath the ground, its presence announced only by a thorn tree that people once would have recognised immediately as a sign of something sacred nearby.
The well carried two Irish names. John O'Donovan, the nineteenth-century scholar and place-name surveyor whose fieldwork documented hundreds of such sites across Ireland, recorded it as Tobar Rí an Domhnaigh, meaning the Well of the King of Sunday, a title sometimes understood as a reference to Christ. The shorter popular form, Sunday's Well, carries the same sense. By around 1840, however, veneration had already ceased. Whatever pattern days or ritual visits the well had once attracted, they had quietly ended before O'Donovan even set down his notes, leaving the site without the community practice that might otherwise have kept it maintained and visible.