Tobermurry, Balla, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Holy Sites & Wells
A stone-lined hollow barely wider than a person's outstretched arms is all that physically remains of Tobermurray, a holy well in the village of Balla in County Mayo.
Now dry and filled with rubble, it sits immediately west of a building known locally as the Rest House and within fifty metres of both a graveyard and a round tower, that cluster of early medieval monuments that so often signals a place of long, layered significance. A small modern shrine to the Blessed Virgin marks the point where the well's narrow drainage gully disappears beneath a boundary wall, a quiet acknowledgement that something older lies beneath.
The well appears by name on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from both 1838 and 1929, which places it firmly within the documented landscape of the nineteenth century. What those same OS Letters of 1838 also record is that a religious station was traditionally performed here on the fifteenth of August, the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin. Such patterns of devotion, known as patterns or stations, involved circuits of prayer around a well and associated sacred features, and Tobermurray had several: an inscribed stone and two penitential stations were all connected to the site. Penitential stations typically involved repeated circuits on foot, sometimes performed barefoot, as a form of prayerful discipline. The well itself is a circular, stone-lined depression 1.3 metres in diameter, linked to a gully roughly forty centimetres wide and fifty-five centimetres deep. At some point the original spring dried up or was lost, and a modern spring-fed well now sits six metres to the north-north-west, enclosed within a curved stone wall and iron railings and approached along a sloping cobbled path. The older well has effectively been folded into the margins of the newer one, the rubble settling into it while devotional life carried on nearby.
