Tobermurray, Rosserk, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Holy Sites & Wells

Tobermurray, Rosserk, Co. Mayo

A hawthorn bush grows from the roof of this small stone well house near the estuary of the River Moy, which is either a detail of charming neglect or a sign that the place has its own ideas about maintenance.

Holy wells, a category of sacred spring site found throughout Ireland and often pre-dating Christianity, tend to accumulate layers of meaning over centuries, and this one near Rosserk is no exception. What makes it particularly unusual is the density of inscription compressed onto its south gable: a Latin cross at the apex, two stone plaques set one above the other, a carved dove with the words Pax et Amor, and a small square window through which visitors can look directly into the pool that fills the entire interior.

The well house as it stands was built in 1798 by John Lynott of Rosserk, as recorded in English on the larger of the two gable plaques, which describes it as a chapel erected in honour of the Blessed Virgin. Separated from that English dedication by the engraved dove is a Latin inscription, partially effaced and difficult to read, but recorded in the 1838 Ordnance Survey Letters as beginning Discite justiciam moniti, a line from Virgil's Aeneid urging the learning of justice. Below Lynott's plaque sits an older stone said to have been at the well before the 1798 construction; it too carries a Latin dedication to the Blessed Virgin and is dated 1684, meaning the site had already been marked and venerated for over a century before Lynott formalised it. The well's draw as a place of pilgrimage was further intensified by a reputed Marian apparition said to have occurred there in the seventeenth century, and a penitential station, a set of fixed prayer stops used in traditional rounds of devotion, lies immediately to the south-west.

The well house sits in pasture at the base of a south-facing slope in a narrow stream valley, roughly fifty metres from where the stream meets the Moy estuary. The structure is compact, its walls of roughly coursed mortared rubble about sixty centimetres thick, its roof of overlapping mortared stone slabs. A low lintelled doorway on the west wall, paved with stone and just wide enough to enter, leads to the pool inside. The outflow runs through an open channel into marshy ground before rejoining the valley stream. It is an unassuming place to find such a concentration of inscription, apparition, and continuing religious use.

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