Holy well, Dawros More, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Holy Sites & Wells

Holy well, Dawros More, Co. Galway

On the western face of a rocky ridge in the bogland north-west of Letterfrack, a natural spring sits surrounded by a modest arrangement of stones.

What makes it worth knowing about is not its scale but the marks said to be pressed into the exposed rock beside it: the imprint of a fist, a hand, and a knee, all attributed to a local saint whose physical presence, according to tradition, was apparently geological enough to leave a permanent record.

The well is associated locally with St Ceannannach, a figure whose name does not appear in the major hagiographies but whose memory has clearly been preserved through the landscape itself. Holy wells of this kind are a recurring feature of Irish religious geography, functioning as focal points for devotion long before and long after the formal structures of the church took hold. The bodily impressions in the rock, sometimes called saint's marks or bullaun-adjacent features, are a common element in such traditions, connecting the abstract figure of a saint to something tactile and specific. The information about the marks here was recorded by T. Robinson, whose detailed mapping work in Connemara over several decades documented many such local traditions that might otherwise have gone unrecorded.

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