Toberfeighin, Rathreedaun, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Holy Sites & Wells
In the rough, undulating pasture of Rathreedaun, a small spring well sits half-buried under sod and hawthorn scrub, its stonework so well absorbed into the hillside that it could pass for a natural feature of the land.
What gives it away, if anything does, is the shallow pool of water still collecting inside a carefully constructed drystone cavity, and the thin stone-roofed channel that carries the outflow westward for three metres before directing it into a field drain. The engineering is modest but deliberate, and the site is more intricate than its overgrown appearance suggests.
The well is dedicated to St. Feichin, a seventh-century Irish monastic figure associated with Fore in County Westmeath and with several sites across Connacht. In Irish, the name Toberfeighin simply means Feichin's well, and the dedication points to a tradition of religious use stretching back well over a thousand years. The well itself rises at the base of a low circular knoll, roughly ten metres across and about one and a half metres high, and the drystone walling on the east side of the cavity is built directly against the slope of this rise, so that the structure and the natural landform are effectively merged. On top of the knoll sits what appears to be a penitential station, a place where pilgrims would perform prescribed prayers or circuits, here marked by a loose concentration of stones. Holy wells throughout Ireland were often accompanied by such stations, as well as by the practice of tying small strips of cloth, known as rags or clooties, to nearby bushes as votive offerings. At Toberfeighin, local memory records that both the stations and the rag-tying continued into the 1950s, making this not simply an ancient survival but a place of living practice within living memory.
The site lies on the southern edge of a stretch of wet, rush-grown ground, with a stream running along the northern boundary of the field and the characteristic low drumlin-like hillocks of the Mayo landscape rising around it. The well structure, the overflow channel, and the cairn on the knoll are largely sod-covered, with brambles and hawthorn growing thickly over the top, so a visitor without prior knowledge of its exact position would likely walk past it without a second glance.