'Oh Well? The Who, What, Where and Why of Holy Wells'

Welcome to the first post in our programme of Holy Wells Blogs as part of the Festival of Archaeology (Council for British Archaeology) @archaeologyuk. We are delighted to have Dr Celeste Ray from the University of The South (Sewanee) as our first guest blogger. Dr Ray is an expert on holy wells and is the curator of Ireland’s Holy Wells County-by-County Project . Stay tuned to our blog this week for an opportunity to contribute to the holy wells movement on behalf of your county.

The Holy Wells Team!

'Oh Well? The Who, What, Where and Why of Holy Wells'

Dr Celeste Ray

In Ireland, Tobair Naofa (holy wells) and Tobair Beannaithe (blessed wells) are water sources, most often springs (but sometimes ponds or entire lakes), which are sites of religious devotion. In distinction from a human-excavated hole or shaft for the collection of water, holy “wells” most commonly appear on their own and can also include seepage pools, and even the hollows of rocks or the cavities on trees left by broken branches where dew and rain collect. Holy wells can have structures over them, and stone impoundments with steps into their waters, or they can simply be unadorned depressions in the ground. Whether they are now along the edges of busy roads or within landscaped gardens, these sacred sites are commonly dedicated to a saint and their waters can be “blessed with a cure” for particular ailments. In historic times, Ireland’s holy wells have recognizable patterns in cures (what illnesses their waters could resolve) and in saint dedications. In my ethnographic research, cultural consultants commented that into the second half of the twentieth-century, most every rural community had a blessed well with a remedy for something, and between the wells of neighboring townlands one could find a ready cure for eye complaints, sore throats and head, back, tooth or stomach aches. Some wells were known to be stronger than others, so that if “your local” failed you, you had recourse to more powerful ones elsewhere. Interviewees who were children in the 1930s and 1940s recalled being taken to wells in other counties for sports injuries or particularly stubborn warts. 

In 1934, as the Irish Free State was still straining towards independence from the British Commonwealth and seeking symbols of national identity, Seamus Ó Duilearga and Sean Ó Súilleabháin of the Irish Folklore Institute chose holy well practices as a national shibboleth. Today, the rural Republic retains more holy wells as part of parish life than any other western or central European country, yet, the socio-economic transitions of the last two decades have meant the loss of many sites to development. Holy wells are irreplaceable resources of archaeological and historical importance, but are also a focus for neighborly unity and for Irish spirituality in a “Post-Catholic” era. 

At the close of the nineteenth century, William Gregory Wood-Martin noted there were approximately 3,000 holy wells in Ireland. This figure was certainly an underestimate as more than five decades earlier, Ordnance Survey workers reported the loss of holy wells in most every county. In 2014, the National Monuments Service documents the location of 2996.Many wells have been lost in recent decades to new farming techniques and mechanization, cattle trampling, afforestation, road widening, and, most commonly, to residential and commercial construction. Development near many sites has negatively impacted the water quality so their waters are not employed or consumed as they were even one or two generations ago. Despite the loss of these sites, they have yet to be systematically studied by archaeologists.

When considered as archaeological sites, holy wells can present unique challenges for study. In the Republic, hundreds are still very much in use as sacred sites. Archeological investigation could be seen as violating prescribed behaviors specific to wells and their precincts, or as destroying the very qualities perceived to make wells thaumaturgical (for example, moving a flagstone thought to have been positioned by a saint as a place for prayers, or disturbing a nearby mound or cairn considered a saint’s “grave”). Practices associated with holy wells (annual cleanings in advance of a pattern day in addition to regular maintenance and landscaping) can also make holy wells archaeologically-resistant sites, but we know very little about what holy wells may retain in terms of ritual deposits or votive offerings as very few have been even partially excavated and fewer of those have been properly investigated for their own value. Any archaeological data collected on wells has generally been acquired in advance of development in a well’s vicinity or during community renovation of a well, not because wells have been considered as archaeological sites themselves. Under one percent of wells in the records of the National Monuments Service have been excavated to any extent. Dismissed as the fetish of the folklorist, holy wells have been ignored in some county archaeological inventories and other surveys as lacking archaeological attributes. Yet, holy wells often have built structures or surrounds, can be lined, and have associated sacred stones. Some such stones, serving as stations, might be fifty meters from the site and demarcate the area of ritual activity, or punctuate a wider sacred landscape of two or three hectares.

In Northern Ireland, the survey of ancient monuments was selective and in the 1940s holy wells were ruled out for inclusion: “The principle of selection” was “to omit raths, standing stones, holy wells, ruins without architectural features, unless they are remarkable either for their historical associations or for their appearances” (Davies, 1941:35). As a result, a simple search of the Northern Ireland Sites and Monuments Record yields 187 holy wells (about 1.24% of the 15,000 sites in the NISMR) and close to a third of these wells lack a documented name or associated saint. Additional wells may be mentioned in the Record as constituent parts of larger ecclesiastical or other sites, and searching for holy wells as components of other sites yields a total of 239 entries (representing 1.59% of the sites in the NISMR), but such a search can generate duplicates.[i] Curiously, close to 10% of the named wells are “Tobar Doney” (varied spellings) or “Sunday’s well” from Tobar Righ an Domhnaigh (the Well of the King of Sundays), which is a high proportion compared with the Republic. Perhaps this was a more “acceptable” name in Protestant-predominant Ulster and may have become the default name for wells with forgotten patrons or effectively replaced indigenous saints who are most common (along with St Patrick) at wells in the South.

[i] Many thanks to John Murphy, Inspector of Historic Monuments, for clarifying search results on the NISMR.

For more, see Dr Ray’s book The Origins of Ireland’s Holy Wells: (2014)

The project

The County-by-County project is a community-sourced survey of holy wells across the island of Ireland and their associated traditions. This citizen-research initiative encourages intergenerational dialogue and encourages young persons to become acknowledged stakeholders in their community cultural resources and traditions. Older generations have the stories and the young have the technological know-how to document them. By interviewing our older neighbors and relatives and adding their knowledge of well lore to an Omeka platform website, members of the public will be creating a national database that will be given to the National Folklore Collection and to equivalent archives in Northern Ireland. This freely-accessible and searchable resource will be an invaluable document of holy well sites, beliefs, and stories for generations to come. The project site is:  http://ihwcbc.omeka.net/