Toberslauntia, Knightswood, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Holy Sites & Wells
A well whose name translates simply as "well of health" sits in marshy ground in Knightswood, County Westmeath, with no surviving religious tradition attached to it, yet with a missing carved stone that ended up in a Franciscan abbey several kilometres away.
That gap between what the name promises and what the site can now tell you is precisely what makes it worth a moment's attention.
The well appears on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1837, already labelled "Toberslauntia", from the Irish "tobar sláinte", meaning well of health. The name implies that people once came here for curative or restorative purposes, though no record of pilgrimages or pattern days has been attached to this particular site. It is a modest structure, roughly one and a half metres in diameter, enclosed by a dry-stone wall, with water draining away through a short channel of around four metres before emptying into a nearby stream. Fifty metres to the north-west there is a separate holy well dedicated to St Michael, which does carry religious associations; the two wells are distinct, though their proximity suggests the area was once considered significant in ways that have mostly faded from local memory. The most telling detail is an absence: an inscribed dripstone, a carved stone used to deflect water above an opening, was reportedly removed from Toberslauntia at some point and taken to Multyfarnham Abbey, a Franciscan friary in the same county with medieval origins. What the inscription said, and when or why the stone was moved, is not recorded.