Toberinneenboy, Kiltacky More, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Holy Sites & Wells

Toberinneenboy, Kiltacky More, Co. Clare

A small depression in the bedrock, barely a metre long and holding only about twenty centimetres of water, might not seem like much.

But Toberinneenboy sits in its shallow basin in the rough pasture of east County Clare carrying a layered identity, a shifting dedication, and a landscape around it that pushes back through several thousand years of human presence. The well is enclosed by the low remains of a drystone wall incorporating large boulders, with mature hazel, whitethorn, and ash trees growing within and around it. A step down from the east leads to the water. It is a place that looks, at first glance, simply neglected.

The name Toberinneenboy appears on Ordnance Survey maps from 1842 and again in 1920, and the OS Letters of 1839 recorded a tradition linking the well to St Inneboy, described as a celebrated Dalcassian Virgin and the patron of Killineeboy, whose feast was marked on the 29th of December. The Dalcassians were a Munster dynasty closely associated with Clare, and a number of wells across the county were reportedly held sacred to her memory. At some point, however, the dedication appears to have shifted; more recent local tradition associates the well with St Colman instead. That kind of transferred or blurred dedication is not unusual among Irish holy wells, where oral memory and local devotion could gradually reshape a site's spiritual ownership over centuries. A local history of the Parish of Kilkeedy published in 1998 also recorded a tradition that a road once ran between this well and a medieval church standing roughly 355 metres to the north-east, suggesting the well was once part of a more active devotional circuit through the area.

The broader landscape adds further texture. About 35 metres to the east-south-east lies a turlough, a seasonally flooding lake characteristic of karst limestone country, where water rises and recedes through fissures in the rock rather than draining in the conventional sense. Roughly 186 metres to the south-south-west is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site typically identified by a mound of heat-shattered stone beside a trough, common across Ireland from the Bronze Age onward. Together these features place the well within a terrain that has been read, used, and moved through for millennia, even if the well itself now sits quiet and largely unremarked in its damp hollow.

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