Saint Martin's Well, Templemartin, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Holy Sites & Wells
Beneath a stretch of reclaimed pasture in Templemartin, County Kilkenny, a holy well dedicated to Saint Martin has effectively disappeared from the surface of the earth.
No stonework marks it, no pattern of worn ground betrays it, and satellite imagery confirms that nothing visible remains. The well is, in the most literal sense, lost in plain sight.
The Ordnance Survey Letters of 1839, a remarkable series of field reports compiled as surveyors mapped Ireland townland by townland, recorded the well in some detail. At that time it lay in bog ground, roughly two hundred yards north-east of the local church, and on the eleventh of November each year, the feast day of Saint Martin of Tours, people gathered there to perform stations. Stations at a holy well typically involved a sequence of prescribed prayers and circumambulations of the site, often repeated a fixed number of times, combining pre-Christian reverence for water sources with later Catholic devotional practice. The fact that this particular well drew people on Saint Martin's Day is notable; in rural Ireland, the saint was associated not only with the liturgical calendar but with the killing of the winter's first animal, a custom that gave the day a distinctly local texture. The pasture that now covers the site was once bogland, and the land drainage that transformed it is almost certainly what buried or erased the well from view entirely. A stream still runs roughly twenty metres to the west.
