Tobereendoney, An Baile Riabhach, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Holy Sites & Wells

Tobereendoney, An Baile Riabhach, Co. Kerry

Some holy wells still draw visitors; others have quietly ceased to exist.

Tobereendoney, whose Irish name Tobar Rí an Domhnaigh translates roughly as the Well of the King of Sunday, belongs to the second category. It no longer survives, and what remains is essentially a description of an absence: a small spring that once emerged from the face of a low hillock, with three stone flags set into the slope around it.

Holy wells in Ireland were traditionally sites of devotional practice, where people performed "stations", a prescribed circuit of prayers and physical actions carried out at fixed points around the well. At Tobereendoney, that custom had already died out by the early nineteenth century, which suggests the site had fallen from active use well before it disappeared from the landscape altogether. The Ordnance Survey Name Books for Dingle, which recorded local place names and features in the nineteenth century, noted the three flags set into the hillock face, a detail that implies a modest but deliberate arrangement, something shaped by intention rather than accident. That physical form is now gone.

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