Tober Patrick, Corrafaireen, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Holy Sites & Wells
Inside a graveyard at Corrafaireen in County Galway, a small spring well dedicated to St Patrick sits within a drystone-built well-chamber that vegetation has largely reclaimed.
The chamber measures about two and a half metres square, and a single step on the south side leads down to the water. What makes the place quietly arresting is the plaque set into the east wall, dated 1688, showing Patrick standing atop a snake and holding a double-armed cross. It is an unusual piece of devotional stonework, specific and deliberate, surviving in a corner of a graveyard that most people would pass without a second glance.
The well was once the focus of a pattern day, the Irish tradition of gathering at a holy well on a saint's feast day to pray, walk circuits, and, inevitably, socialise. Pilgrims circled the well along an embanked pathway, roughly two metres wide, that still traces an arc from the south around to the northeast of the chamber. Pattern days at holy wells were communal occasions that often blurred the boundary between devotion and festivity, and faction fights, organised brawls between rival family or townland groupings, were not unheard of at the larger gatherings. At this well, the pattern eventually came to an end in the eighteenth century when the local bishop suppressed it after a man was killed in one of those annual fights. The exact date of the pattern, and which feast day it fell on, appears not to have been recorded.
The well-chamber today is heavily overgrown beyond the line of the old pathway, which itself remains the clearest physical trace of how the site was once used. The plaque, modest in size at seventy centimetres by fifty, rewards a close look given the detail of the carving and the specific date it carries.