Holy well, Flemingtown, Co. Dublin

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Holy Sites & Wells

Holy well, Flemingtown, Co. Dublin

A holy well that nobody prays at any more, wedged between two flat rocks in the corner of a small garden, with farm drains emptying into it and a history of use as a dumping ground, is not the most obviously compelling of sites.

Yet the Lady Well at Flemingtown in County Dublin carries a quiet persistence. It appears on every edition of the Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps under that name, a small but consistent acknowledgement that this natural spring, rising through a rocky outcrop beside farm buildings, was once considered something more than a convenient water source.

The folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair visited and documented the well in 1958, describing it as a pool roughly five feet by three feet, set between two flat rocks, fed by a good spring. He noted that no devotions were being observed at the time, though the site was still recognised locally as a holy well. Holy wells in Ireland are typically natural springs associated with a patron saint or with older pre-Christian veneration, often visited on a pattern day for prayer or ritual washing. By 1974, when Henry A. Wheeler recorded the site for the Sites and Monuments Record, the well had a concrete dam and appeared to be used mainly for watering animals. Research by Skyvova in 2005 noted that the structure had once been considerably larger, with water channelled through the rock and directed into a small stream. Geophysical survey work carried out that same year in the adjacent field to the east detected natural and ferrous anomalies but no definite archaeological features.

The well today is a roughly circular, water-filled depression, enclosed by a recently built earthen bank and ditch intended to keep livestock out. The photographs taken by Ó Danachair in 2004 and 2005, now held in the National Folklore Collection at UCD and accessible through the Dúchas archive online, give a clearer sense of the physical setting than the current condition of the site might suggest. Anyone visiting should be aware that the site has suffered from dumping in recent years, and that what remains is modest in scale, more interesting for its documented history and its stubbornly persistent place-name than for any dramatic physical presence.

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