Holy well, Trooperstown, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Holy Sites & Wells

Holy well, Trooperstown, Co. Wicklow

In the Wicklow townland of Trooperstown, a well sits beside a mass rock in a field still known locally as 'Church Field', carrying within that small cluster of features an entire compressed history of clandestine Catholic worship.

The well goes by the name Fraughan's Well, and the combination of holy well, mass rock, and a field name that remembers a vanished ecclesiastical presence in a single location is the kind of convergence that tends to repay closer attention.

The traditions attached to Fraughan's Well were recorded in the 1930s through the Irish Folklore Commission's Schools Manuscript Collection, in which local people set down what they knew of the well's character and reputation. The manuscripts describe it as a holy well situated near the spot where a priest said Mass during the Penal Laws, the period from the late seventeenth century into the eighteenth when Catholic practice was suppressed under British legislation and clergy were obliged to celebrate the sacraments outdoors and in secret, often at flat-topped rocks in remote or sheltered locations. The well was associated with cures for sores and pains, and local belief held that it was unlucky to interfere with it. The Blessed Virgin was said to have been seen there. The well took its name from the Fraughan family, who owned the surrounding land in the nineteenth century. Also present in Church Field is a bullaun stone, a large stone with one or more rounded depressions ground into its surface, a type of feature found across Ireland and often associated with early ecclesiastical sites, sometimes used for grinding, sometimes connected later with folk cures or ritual practice. The density of these features in one field, each carrying its own layer of use and memory, suggests that Church Field has been understood as a significant place across a very long span of time.

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