Toberaniddaun, Pottlerath, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Holy Sites & Wells

Toberaniddaun, Pottlerath, Co. Kilkenny

Near the village of Kilmanagh in County Kilkenny, a hollow in the ground is just about all that remains of a place that once drew people in considerable distress.

A running sore, a recurring fever, a failing child; these were the kinds of afflictions that brought people to Toberaniddaun, a holy well whose reputation for miraculous cures was described, even in the nineteenth century, as extending back beyond living memory.

Writing in 1883, Holahan recorded several accounts of people who believed they had been healed at the well, among them a man with a persistent sore on his leg, three men suffering from what he called "the ague", a malarial-type fever characterised by chills and shaking that was not uncommon in damp lowland areas of Ireland, and a sickly child. Two Ordnance Survey maps, the six-inch edition of 1839 and the revision carried out between 1899 and 1900, both mark two wells sitting close together at the site. By the time of the later survey, the more northerly of the pair was identified as a spring, with a stream running southward from it, while the second was specifically annotated as the holy well. The distinction matters: it suggests the two features were understood separately, one practical, one devotional, even as they shared the same ground.

The holy well itself has since disappeared beneath the surface, leaving no visible structure. The spring, however, still registers in the landscape as a shallow depression, a faint trace of what was once, for certain people in certain circumstances, a place of genuine consequence.

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