Tobermolagga, Baile An Bhaoithín, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Holy Sites & Wells

Tobermolagga, Baile An Bhaoithín, Co. Kerry

At the foot of the eastern slopes of Croaghmarhin in Co. Kerry, tucked into the northern corner of a field, is a cluster of stones that once drew people to walk, pray, and do penance.

The site takes its name from its well, Tobar na Molaige, though the spring that once fed it has long since dried up. The covering slab still lies in place over what is now a dry hollow, and scattered across the irregularly shaped ground between the former well and the field walls are low mounds and slabs set on their edges, the likely remnants of penitential stations. These were the physical waypoints of a devotional circuit known as "rounds", a practice in which pilgrims walked a prescribed route, pausing to pray at each station in turn.

People were still making rounds here at the beginning of the twentieth century, but the practice had died out by 1960, according to the folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair, who visited and photographed the site in 1947 and described the well at that time as a good spring with some rough drystone work. Around 1930, an underground passage was discovered in an adjacent field, though no further detail about it appears to have been recorded. The other surviving focus of the site is a carved cross-slab, just under a metre tall, standing to the west of the dry hollow. Its eastern face carries a plain cross set within an irregular oval, with a small cross in each of the four quadrants. Notches cut beyond the circle along the side and lower arms add a further layer of design, and below the oval sit two unusual secondary cross motifs: one with upward-curving arms that resembles a triple-branched candelabrum, the other with downward-curving arms and a small dot in the angles between the arms and the shaft. It has been suggested that these two figures may represent the two thieves crucified alongside Christ, distinguished from each other by the direction of their arms, though the carving is old enough and worn enough that certainty is not possible.

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