Toberone, Crohane, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Holy Sites & Wells
A lone beech tree rising from a low swell of grassland is, by most measures, an unremarkable sight.
Here, in a field near Crohane in County Tipperary, it may be the only remaining indicator of a holy well that has otherwise vanished entirely from the surface of the ground.
The well was recorded by the antiquarian John O'Donovan as being dedicated to the Virgin St Sinech, the patroness of Cruachan Moy-Owney, the old territorial name for this part of Tipperary. Holy wells in Ireland were typically sites of devotional practice known as stations, where people would pray and process around the well on a pattern day, often the feast day of the saint to whom the well was dedicated. O'Donovan's account, preserved in Michael O'Flanagan's 1930 compilation of the Ordnance Survey letters, noted that no such stations had been performed at the well for thirty years at the time of writing, suggesting that the tradition had already lapsed well before the nineteenth century closed. By the time anyone came to look again, no physical trace of the well remained. The beech tree, standing on a slight rise of ground to the north-west of a nearby church and graveyard, is now the only feature that might plausibly mark where it once was, though even that connection is uncertain.
The church and graveyard survive some sixty metres to the south-east, and the wider site sits within ordinary farmland. The well itself, St Sinech, and the devotional life once organised around her name have left almost nothing behind, save a name, a scholarly footnote, and perhaps a tree.
