Holy well, Bridetree, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Holy Sites & Wells
Somewhere in Bridetree, County Dublin, a holy well that was once regularly visited by local people simply ceased to exist, swallowed up by road-widening works sometime before 1958.
What survives in its place is a roadside pump, which the folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair believed was drawing from the same underground spring. It is an oddly matter-of-fact end for a site that had clearly held meaning for the surrounding community, replaced not by a monument or a plaque but by a piece of functional street furniture.
Holy wells are natural springs associated with veneration, prayer, and pattern days, the latter being annual gatherings, often on a saint's feast day, during which people would pray, walk a prescribed circuit, and sometimes leave offerings. This particular well was recorded by Ó Danachair in 1958, who noted that it had been much visited in former times before being destroyed in road widening operations. The reference also appears in Healy's 1975 survey of such sites. Lying just 110 metres to the north-west is St Catherine's Well, a separately recorded site, which suggests this stretch of ground was once considered notably significant, with two distinct spring sources in close proximity drawing people for reasons that are now only partially recoverable.
Because the well itself no longer exists, there is nothing to stand beside or photograph. The interest here is of a different kind, one for those who like to find the negative space left by something that was once quietly important. The roadside pump, if it still stands, would be the only physical trace. St Catherine's Well to the north-west remains a recorded monument and may repay a visit for anyone curious about the pattern of devotional landscape in this part of Dublin, though the relationship between the two sites is not fully documented in the surviving sources.