Tober Murry, Dubhachta, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Holy Sites & Wells
Along the northern edge of the Dooghta River valley in County Galway, a low drystone enclosure holds a pair of holy wells fed by a small stream.
What makes the arrangement unusual is its form: the enclosure is E-shaped on plan, roughly three and a half metres long and not quite three metres wide, with the wells sitting within its arms like objects carefully set into a bracket. Modern offerings left nearby confirm that the site is still visited and still regarded as significant, even if its older, stranger history is less widely remembered.
The two wells are dedicated to Muire, the Virgin Mary, and to St Fechín, the sixth-century abbot associated with Fore in County Westmeath and, closer to this valley, with the monastery at Cong. Local tradition holds that the wells once contained a stone idol believed to control the weather, and that it was St Fechín himself who eventually destroyed it, smashing it to pieces. The story is a familiar one in the Irish landscape, where early Christian figures are credited with dismantling older sacred objects, though the idol here seems to have been particularly associated with the site's atmospheric power. More arresting still is a reference preserved in the Ordnance Survey Letters, the remarkable series of topographical notes compiled in the 1830s by scholars attached to the OS mapping project. They recorded the existence of a flagstone near St Fechín's well called Leac Fechín, described as a stone by which men were put to the ordeal. The nature of that ordeal is not explained, and no trace of the stone was found when the site was later examined. Whether it was removed, broken up, or simply absorbed into the fabric of the enclosure, nobody appears to know.
The site sits on the roadside, which makes it relatively approachable, though the drystone structure is modest in scale and easy to overlook without knowing what to look for. The E-shaped plan is best appreciated by walking around the enclosure rather than viewing it straight on, and the wells themselves, fed by the stream, remain within its arms.