Well, Monkstown, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Utility Structures
Somewhere along the settled, suburban streets of Monkstown in south County Dublin, there is a well that has been closed to use for well over a century, and whose exact location nobody now seems able to confirm.
It goes by the name Juggy's Well, a quietly peculiar designation that hints at older, more local layers of memory beneath the coastal town's Victorian and Edwardian surface.
The well appears in the records largely because of a visit by Stokes in 1895, who noted it briefly but recorded that it had already been closed for use for some time by that point. Holy wells, or wells with reputations for curative or sacred properties, were once widespread features of the Irish landscape, frequently maintained by communities across generations and associated with particular saints or local customs. By the late nineteenth century, many had fallen into neglect as older practices faded, and some were simply absorbed into developing townscapes, their physical traces built over or forgotten. Juggy's Well appears to have been among these. The name itself is informal and vernacular, the kind of place-name that survives through habit rather than official record, and it offers no obvious clue as to the well's origin or any formal dedication.
The honest situation for anyone curious about Juggy's Well is that it cannot be precisely located from the available evidence. The notes compiled by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy record it simply as being in Monkstown, with no further coordinates or landmarks given. It is, in that sense, a place defined more by its absence than its presence, known to have existed, known to have been visited and noted, but no longer findable in any practical way. That quality, a named thing that has slipped just out of reach, gives it a particular kind of interest for anyone drawn to the edges of the documented past.