Tober Feigheen, Barnabrack, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Holy Sites & Wells

Tober Feigheen, Barnabrack, Co. Sligo

In a wooded thicket at the foot of a slope in Barnabrack, a small circle of stones roughly two metres across marks what was once a holy well.

The water is long gone, and the site has the quality of something that has quietly forgotten itself, a place whose purpose dissolved before anyone thought to record it properly. What remains is just enough to suggest what was once here: a sacred spring, a gathering place, and a tradition of devotion that stretched back into the early medieval period.

The well is attributed to St. Feichin of Ballisodare, an early Irish saint who, according to tradition recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1836, created the well and used it as a meeting place with his brother, St. Adamnan of Skreen. The two Skreen saints sharing the same name, Feichin and Adamnan, points to the tight networks of monastic affiliation and kinship that shaped early Christian Ireland in Connacht and beyond. Patterns, the traditional gatherings of prayer and ritual that took place at holy wells on a saint's feast day, were held here until the 1860s, when the practice died out, as it did at many such sites across the country during and after the upheavals of the mid-nineteenth century. Two objects associated with the well were noted in later surveys: a stone said to bear the impressions of St. Feichin's knees, and a cross or cross-inscribed stone. Neither has been found. The knee-print stone in particular belongs to a recognisable class of early medieval devotional object, where physical marks in rock were understood as traces of a saint's bodily presence, making the stone itself a kind of relic. That both objects have disappeared, or perhaps were never precisely located, adds another layer of uncertainty to a site already defined by absence.

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