Tobermacduagh, Ballyclery, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Holy Sites & Wells

Tobermacduagh, Ballyclery, Co. Galway

At the foot of a south-facing slope in rough Galway pastureland, three spring wells sit within a few dozen metres of one another, the closest pair almost neighbours.

The most significant of the three is a shallow rectangular chamber built in drystone, without mortar, measuring just under four metres long and barely a metre high. It is now filled with loose stones, and nothing in the way of tokens, medals, or votive offerings survives at the site. What makes it quietly arresting is precisely this emptiness: there is no sign of the devotional life it once held, yet the structure itself, and the cluster of wells around it, speaks to a place that was once a fixed point in the religious calendar of this part of east Galway.

The well takes its name, Tobermacduagh, from Saint Mac Duagh, the seventh-century founder of the monastery at Kilmacduagh a few kilometres to the south, whose diocese this area fell within. When the antiquarian Fahey documented the site in 1893, a Turas was still being carried out there. A Turas, in Irish devotional practice, is a penitential circuit, a prescribed series of prayers and physical movements performed around a sacred site, often on a saint's feast day. By the time Fahey was writing, many such observances had faded, so the fact that this one was still active at the close of the nineteenth century is worth noting. About five metres to the south-east of the well stands a small stone cairn, roughly six and a half metres across, topped by a cross dated 1820. Two further covered spring wells lie to the west and south-west, at fifteen and twenty-two metres respectively, suggesting that this corner of the pasture was understood, over a long period, as a place of some consequence.

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