Tobernaughtin, Cockhill, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Holy Sites & Wells
A scattering of stones at the foot of a hill is all that survives of a place once considered sacred enough to carry a saint's name and draw people to its water.
St Naughtin's Well, marked on Ordnance Survey maps as far back as 1841-42 and again in 1914, has long since lost the small pool and overhanging whitethorn trees that defined it in living memory. The water itself has not disappeared; it has simply been redirected, piped now for cattle rather than pilgrims.
The well takes its name from a figure identified only as Naughtin, one of several saints of that name listed in the Irish calendar, and even when enquiries were made historically, nothing could be established to confirm which one was meant. A possible connection to the nearby Kilnaughtin Church suggests the well may once have been part of a broader pattern of local devotion, holy wells in Ireland often sitting in relation to early church sites and serving as focal points for rounds, the ritual circuits of prayer and petition that were a common feature of popular religious practice. The folklorist Caoimhín O'Danachair, writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland in 1958, recorded the well as it then appeared, a modest pool beneath a cluster of whitethorn, the thorns themselves being a tree long associated in Irish tradition with sacred water. That description now reads as something close to an obituary.