Toberboydan, Commons, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Holy Sites & Wells

Toberboydan, Commons, Co. Clare

At the southern edge of a level valley floor in County Clare, water seeps through dense overgrowth into a boggy patch of ground and collects in a shallow drystone-lined depression barely a metre deep.

It drains away again through a field-drain to the north, and to a casual eye it might look like nothing more than a wet hollow in a field. What it actually is, or was, is a holy well with a documented tradition of healing, visited by people seeking cures for sore eyes and for children described in 1839 as "delicate", a word that carried real weight in the context of infant mortality in rural Ireland.

The well is dedicated to Baighdeán, a saint obscure enough that little is recorded about him beyond his local associations. His name attaches to this site and, some 3.2 kilometres to the south-east, to the monastic site of Kilvoydan, suggesting a figure of some significance in the early Christian landscape of this part of the Burren, even if the historical record has not preserved much detail about who he was. The well appears by name on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 and again on the Cassini edition of 1920, written as "Toberboydan", while Tim Robinson's meticulous 1977 map of the Burren rendered it in Irish as "Tobar Bhaighdeáin". "Tobar" simply means well in Irish, so the name translates roughly as the well of Baighdeán. The OS Letters of 1839, compiled by surveyors who recorded local traditions alongside physical features, noted that this well and a nearby one were both actively visited for their curative properties at that time.

The well sits in a boggy area roughly fifteen metres across, fed by water coming through overgrowth on the rising ground to the south. Its drystone lining, the method of using dry-laid stones without mortar to stabilise the edges, is modest in scale, roughly a metre and a half in each direction. It is the kind of site that rewards a slow look rather than a quick one.

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Pete F
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