Toberlaghteen, Donaskeagh, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Holy Sites & Wells

Toberlaghteen, Donaskeagh, Co. Tipperary

At the base of a north-east-facing slope in County Tipperary, a natural spring still pushes bubbles to the surface of a small, keyhole-shaped well.

The well is only about half a metre across, defined by a collapsed dry-stone wall, and a simple cup rests at its south-western edge for the use of pilgrims. A channel roughly sixty metres long carries the overflow eastward until it drains into the Multeen River. It is a quietly functional arrangement, and the fact that it still draws pilgrims at all is part of what makes it worth attention.

The well is known as Tobar Lachtin, a holy well dedicated to a saint of that name, and it appears under its anglicised form on the 1904 Ordnance Survey six-inch map. Writing in 1930, O'Flanagan recorded that the well had once been walled round and arched over, and that pilgrims were still visiting on Saturdays. He also noted a patch of thorn-covered ground roughly thirty paces to the north believed to mark the site of an early church, the remains of which lie approximately twenty-five metres to the north-west of the well today. Most significantly, O'Flanagan recorded that a Pattern had been held here annually on Corpus Christi Thursday until about thirty years before his writing, when it was abolished. A Pattern, in Irish folk-religious tradition, was a communal gathering at a sacred site on the feast day of the associated saint, typically involving prescribed circuits of the well or other holy spots, prayers, and often music and socialising. The suppression of such gatherings was common throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, driven by clerical concern about the festivities that tended to accompany the devotional elements.

The well sits in improved pasture within a hollow shaded by mature deciduous trees, with loose boulders marking its edges. The cup on the south-western side is a small but telling detail, suggesting the site has not simply been remembered but has continued, in a modest way, to be used.

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