In the midst of Coronarama our county employed a Heritage Officer with a background in archaeology but very wide interests in culture, our place in Nature, our built environment, our beliefs and baggage. One definition of Heritage being: that which is a) valued /valuable worth preserving and b) come down to us from the past. Go Eoin! He's been out to see our Ringstone several times despite it being right at the very edge of his bailiwick. His latest project builds on the fact that there are[who knew?] ~46 Holy Wells in the county - which is only 900 sq.km. in extent - so everyone is a short walk from the waters of balm.
Holy Wells? My jam! Ten years ago, I was 'supervising' a project at The Institute which was measuring Lithium in the groundwater. The Effective, Dr Lithium as he became, read the literature and came across the work of John Cade using lithium carbonate to control the devastating symptoms of bipolar and other mental disorders. In addition to obtaining and analysing several hundred water samples from domestic bore-holes, the Effective stopped whenever he passed a Holy Well and ran those samples through his analytical engine. Sorry folks, but we have waters of balm but not waters for balmy: the data is noisy, but there is no significant association between elevated Lithium [to soothe the troubled minds of bachelor farmers?!] and the location of Holy Wells: cf, - Saints, scholars, and schizophrenics : mental illness in rural Ireland [1979] by Nancy Scheper-Hughes.
Eoin would like evidence that Holy Wells do good for the well-being of the plain people of the County. What say renting a bus, filling it half full of old people [who are used to free travel!], and visiting a couple of accessible Holy Wells? And further, giving the crumblies a free lunch and asking them to assess their feelings of bliss before and after visiting each sacred place. Hold me back, dear reader, that is how I spent the last Saturday in September: watching the soggy countryside through the rain-spattered windows of a charabanc.
Setting off through the tail-end of a rainy front which passed over Ireland that Saturday morning, first we travelled South to St Lazerian's Well in Old Leighlin at the base of the Castlecomer plateau. The well is in a little dell on the edge of the village where the road takes a savage turn. It was not the safest place to park while disembarking a couple of dozen frail elders. But, heck, the L3037 is a minor road going from Smallsville to Unimportant so there wasn't a lot of honking traffic. The steps down to the well were also lethal slippy for the unsure-of-foot. But nobody died and no hips were broken. Perhaps because of the mediation of the many prayers uttered beside the Holy Hawthorn which is within the enclosure of the well:
The rain had blown through by the time we'd had a) a historical timeline / explanation on St Lazerian's well b) a reading by Caroline Busher from one of her YA books c) a reading by Clifton Redmond of a poem inspired by St Lazerian, St Moling and Eó Ruis one of the five sacred trees of Olde Ireland. I hope that these creatives were on the payroll, rather than will work for food like the rest of us. Free travel [✓] free lunch [✓] but the payback was several questionnaires on how our souls were feeling Before vs After each stop. Gotta say that my answers about happiness, engagement, anxiety did not alter one jot through the day. But I had a pretty good day without experiencing changed, changed utterly a terrible beauty is born.
At lunch [in the Tinryland Community Hub - excellent home baking] we Olds fell to discussing recipes, virtues and thriftiness of bread&butter pudding. For the 30-something at our table it was like she'd just stepped out of the Tardis into 1943. I was also able to get out my phone and, between cakes, show my neighbour a picture of our neolithic art work. Gotta say that the lunch was better and more interesting than, although superficially identical to, the lunch we got in Myshall in August.
After lunch, it was back to work . . . into the bus and on to Cranavane [sunny spring pics] just off the N80 near Kildavin.
Never 'eard of it, me; let alone gone to visit before. It's a very short detour from our route to Altamont Gardens, which we do go to on the reg'lar. I'll be sure to bring people back to Crann a Bhán even though the eponymous white tree was felled a few years ago before it fell on someone. St Finnian's Cranavane is a different vibe to St Lazerian's - more naturalistic [mowed grass, daffodils in season] and with less fetish. Kindly, because they surely didn't have to, a handful of the Cranavane care-and-maintenance team were there to greet us and show us their treasures. This absolutely made a difference: to get the insider details of how it all works and what it takes to make available a contemplative space for all. It's obvious to all, for example, that folks throw coins into the elongated pond in front of the Well. But without hearing it from the horse's mouth, I wouldn't know about the local custom of dunking coffins in that water on the way to the burial ground up the road.
The Carers were at pains to acknowledge that the avenue to the enclosure and the rath itself were the private property of a local farmer, whose father had been at the forefront of the "re-discovery" of St Finnian's a generation ago. I was little bit mortified when my lunching neighbour spoke up at that point with "and we should recognise that man Bob over there, another discoverer of Ireland's heritage, who a) was able to recognise the work of human hand on a tumbled old stone b) makes access across his fields easier than a lot of farmers would". I had to get me phone out and show another handful of people what he was talking about.
As The Guardian of the Ringstone in another part of the county my line is "According to the Land Registry, we own the fields but we don't own the heritage - that's part of the commonwealth or maybe better the common weal". Heck and jiminy, if, as Thoreau maintained, The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation then it behooves us Haves to share a little of our fortune with the Have-nots.
CwCoCo Heritage is organizing a parallel jaunt
data-gathering field trip this coming Saturday,
there may be tickets still ask:
carlowholywells@gmail.com
Further? There are some Carlow County Library YT explanatory clips assoc with the Holy Well Project.
Title pun explanatory footnote: The Beloved's late lamented Uncle Henri had a much told funny tale which hinged an important English visitor to N. Nigeria being hilariously mistranslated into Hausa.
I go further →→→ "kafin na kai ga uban kowa" ie. I visit your male parent
Well well well →→→ "rijiya rijiya rijiya" ie. borehole borehole borehole
By this I about doubled my Hausa vocab.
