Tobergorey, Monatore, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Holy Sites & Wells

Tobergorey, Monatore, Co. Wicklow

A natural spring sitting in a shallow hollow in the middle of a working agricultural field is not what most people picture when they think of a holy well.

There is no enclosure, no votive offerings tied to nearby branches, no worn stone basin. What survives at this site in Monatore, County Wicklow, is quieter than that: a place that has been steadily absorbed into the surrounding farmland, its original form now difficult to read, its significance preserved mainly in a name.

The name itself does considerable work. Tobergorey, recorded as "Tubber-agorry Well" in the Ordnance Survey Parish Namebooks, translates roughly as the well of Gorey or Guaire. That Gorey is not the town in County Wexford but a vernacular rendering of the saint's name Moghóróg, a figure associated with Delgany, a few miles to the east on the Wicklow coast. The Martyrology of Donegal, a seventeenth-century catalogue of Irish saints and their feast days, places St Moghóróg on 23 December, a date that would once have given the site its annual moment of significance. The Ordnance Survey Parish Namebooks noted that the spring had been reputed as "good for various cures", the kind of healing reputation that attached to holy wells across Ireland, where the water's sanctity was understood to derive from the saint to whom the well was dedicated. Modern farming has reshaped the ground around the spring considerably, and a recent inspection found little to indicate what the site once looked like in any formal or ritual sense.

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Pete F
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