Well, Springmount, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Utility Structures
At Springmount in County Tipperary, the very name of the townland gestures towards water, yet when investigators visited in 1995, there was nothing to see.
The wells that had been carefully mapped in the nineteenth century had, by that point, vanished entirely from the surface of the land.
The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map records two wells at the site, each given a distinct name. One is marked as Frank's Well, personal and specific in the way that minor local features often were. The other is recorded as Tobергlorат, a name rooted in the Irish word "tobar", meaning well, which frequently signals either a sacred or a long-established water source. That second name carries particular weight because it appears in the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a detailed land valuation compiled in the aftermath of the Cromwellian wars as the crown sought to account for Irish landholdings. Its appearance in that document places the well, or at least its name, firmly in the mid-seventeenth century, though the water source itself may be considerably older. Natural spring wells of this kind were often gathering points for communities long before any written record thought to mention them, sometimes acquiring religious or customary significance over generations. By the time the Ordnance Survey cartographers passed through, both wells were considered notable enough to name and plot. By 1995, neither left any visible trace.



