Tobernamolt, Tubrid More, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Holy Sites & Wells

Tobernamolt, Tubrid More, Co. Kerry

The name alone is a small puzzle.

Tobar na Molt translates roughly as "well of the wethers", wethers being castrated male sheep, which is an odd thing to name a holy well after until the legend attached to it is considered. According to tradition, when St Erc baptised St Brendan here, he was presented with three wethers in return, and the name stuck. The well itself, reached by a path across the fields and enclosed within a small rectangular walled space, contains three focal points: the well, the altar, and the grave. The grave is said to be the burial place of St Ita, one of the most venerated women saints of early Irish Christianity, and the altar carries a limestone slab carved with three figures, identified as St Brendan, St Erc, and St Ita. One legend holds that a Protestant landlord once removed the carved stone to Oakpark, near Tralee, and that it was miraculously returned.

An observer named Talbot-Crosbie visited and wrote about the site sometime between 1908 and 1912, and his account captures something rarely preserved in dry survey descriptions. The well, he noted, is not what most people picture when they think of a holy well. It is a roughly circular pool about fifteen feet across and four feet deep, fed by a bottom spring, with an outflow piped westward so that pilgrims completing their rounds need not wade. The flow is slight. Occasional wisps of gas escape through the slime at the bottom, sending pale bubbles to the surface. Crutches, some of them moss-grown and worm-eaten, were left behind by those who believed they had been cured. The altar was heaped with votive offerings of a more ordinary kind: broken religious images, scapulars, a child's boot, buttons, and pins pressed into the turf around three smooth polished stones outside the grave. Generations of pilgrims had scooped away considerable quantities of the surrounding soil to take home, along with water and duck-weed from the pool, as a cure for illness. Talbot-Crosbie described the pilgrimage days themselves, three Saturdays falling before May Day, before the 24th of June, and before the 29th of September, as drawing crowds of sufferers who processed in near-total silence through the enclosure, completing three rounds of three rosaries, some going on to immerse themselves in the water, most taking only a few sips.

The pilgrimage pattern he witnessed on the Saturday before May Day brought pilgrims from considerable distances, some arriving by train and continuing on foot. Beggars stationed themselves at every gate along the field path, and a toll-collector stood at the entrance to the enclosure itself. What Talbot-Crosbie found most difficult to convey was the quality of the silence: files of people moving across the grass without a sound, faces wholly absorbed, fingers working rosary beads, making, as he put it, dusky sinuous tracks upon the lush, vivid grass.

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