Tobermurry, Kilclogherane, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Holy Sites & Wells
At the side of a quiet Kerry lane, partially swallowed by overgrowth, sits a holy well whose physical form is easy to miss entirely.
What marks it out is not a stone-lined basin or a votive niche but a flat kneeling stone, hollowed on its upper surface where water collects, with a small U-shaped stone placed upside-down upon it to form a low arch. The opening in that arch, barely 28 centimetres wide and 23 centimetres high, frames the water within. A few other stones are built up on either side. It is a modest, almost domestic arrangement, and yet this spot, known as Tobermurry, was described in the 1940s as being much venerated across the neighbourhood and surrounding districts, with cures attributed to those who had completed the rounds there.
The practice of making the rounds, a form of ritual circumambulation common at Irish holy wells and sacred sites, had a precise shape here. Pilgrims would begin either at Tobermurry or at a bullaun stone, a large boulder with one or more worn cup-shaped hollows used in ritual grinding or prayer, located about 200 metres to the west. They would then proceed clockwise around the remains of a possible church within a children's burial ground that sits between the two sites, roughly 40 metres west of the well. Crucially, the rounds were made at the margins of the day, after dark or before daylight, on the 1st of May and the 1st of August, dates corresponding to the old Gaelic festivals of Bealtaine and Lughnasa. Writing in 1906, a commentator named Cooke recorded an old hawthorn tree nearby, surrounded by bushes, brambles and ferns, and noted that pilgrims tied rags to it as part of the ritual. A local person remembered that up to the 1960s, pieces of black cloth, rosary beads, and crosses fashioned from a nearby bush still hung close to the well. By the time of more recent observation, those offerings were gone.
The well sits in the verge on the southern side of the lane, close to the children's burial ground, and the overgrowth that partially covers it today means it rewards careful looking rather than a casual glance. The kneeling stone has also been noted as a possible saddle quern, a type of grinding stone, which adds a further layer of ambiguity to an already layered place. The cluster of related sites, well, bullaun stone, and possible church remains, within a short stretch of ground gives the area an unusual density of quiet, interconnected significance.
