Saint Augustine's Holy Well, Abbeypark, Co. Galway

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Holy Sites & Wells

Saint Augustine’s Holy Well, Abbeypark, Co. Galway

A holy well that holds no water and offers little to the eye is still a holy well.

This one, dedicated to St Augustine and sitting in the farmland of Abbeypark in County Galway, survives as a small unroofed rectangular chamber of dry-laid stone, measuring less than a metre in each direction, surrounded on three sides by a low stony bank. The well has dried up at some point, and what remains is poorly preserved, easily missed in the field. Yet for all its modesty, it was once the focus of a living devotional tradition.

The well lies roughly 500 metres south-southeast of Clontuskert Abbey, an Augustinian priory whose presence almost certainly explains both the dedication and the practice. Pattern days, from the Irish "lá pátrúin", were annual gatherings held at a local holy well or sacred site on the feast day of the associated saint, combining prayer and rounds of the site with something closer to a fair or communal celebration. Here, the pattern fell on the 28th of August, the feast of St Augustine of Hippo, and was still recorded as a tradition in 1927, when the antiquarian collector O'Flanagan documented it. An old field bank running northeast lies just over a metre and a half to the south-east of the well-chamber, suggesting the site has long been part of a worked agricultural landscape rather than set apart from it.

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