Toberarraght, Lurga, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Holy Sites & Wells
In a level pasture in County Mayo, roughly fifty metres west of the Mullaghaghanoe River, a spring well sits encased in concrete, its water accessible only through a small hole covered by a flat stone slab held up on four concrete pillars.
The well was dry when last formally documented, and yet the site continues to carry the weight of centuries of devotion. What might look to a passing eye like a modest, slightly utilitarian rural fixture is in fact a holy well with an unbroken record going back at least as far as the first Ordnance Survey mapping of 1838, and almost certainly a great deal further than that.
The well is dedicated to St. Attracta, an early Irish saint associated with healing and with the province of Connacht, and the traditional pattern day, a gathering for prayer and ritual circumambulation held at a holy well or sacred site, falls on the 11th of August. Local memory holds that the water was reputed to cure eye complaints. The current concrete enclosure replaced an earlier stone wall in 1954, during the Marian Year, a worldwide Catholic observance marking the centenary of the definition of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Alongside the well, a concrete shrine houses a modern statue of St. Attracta, and set into the shrine is a small cross-inscribed stone slab, just 24 centimetres wide and 30 centimetres tall. Cut into it is a simple cross rising from a triangular base, and the date 1767. This slab was not always where it now sits; local accounts suggest it was originally placed on top of a dry-stone pillar structure that once stood immediately to the south of the well, now gone. A rough heap of stones a few metres to the north-west, and a plain flat slab lying nearby on the ground, are quiet hints that the site once had more to it than what remains visible today.