Lily of Ireland

Fifty Holy Wells, #35

St Dymphna’s Well, Killeenadeema, County Galway

Back in the Emerald Isle this week, we find a well dedicated to a saint whose life, some 1400 years ago, has very real material consequences for people living in the world today. It’s quite a story.

St Dymphna’s Well can be found down an ordinary little rural road in east Galway. It’s beautifully tended by its local guardians, and obviously still widely visited, as proven by the pile of offerings around the statue of the saint:

And also by the many fresh items on the rag tree:

That’s the well in the foreground. It’s not to be confused with the bullaun stone which can also be found at the site, and which, at first, I thought was the well itself (for more about bullauns, see this story from earlier in this series):

This is a popular well, despite its remote location. A popular well is often evidence of a popular saint, and this is the case here. St Dymphna was a seventh century Irish saint, but she has more resonance for the modern world than many of her now-obscure contemporaries. A prayer plaque at the wellside explains why:

St Dymphna is the patron saint of the mentally ill, and her life story explains why. She was born in the north-east of Ireland, in a petty kingdom called Oriel, of which her father was the king. He was pagan but her mother was Christian, and at the age of 14 Dymphna followed her mother’s example, taking a vow of chastity and dedicating her life to Christ. Soon after, though, tragedy struck: her mother died. Hard as it was to take, this was just the beginning of Dymphna’s trouble.

Her father, you see, had been very much in love with his wife, and without her, his mind began to crumble. His friends and relatives advised him to marry again, but he refused to do so unless someone as beautiful as his late wife could be found. He sent messengers and advisors the length and breadth of the country in search of a suitable bride, but none was to be found. The increasingly broken and obsessed king could find nobody whose beauty could match that of his wife.

Nobody, that is, except his own daughter.

As the king’s mental state disintegrated, he began to believe that his daughter, Dymphna, was the only woman he could ever marry. She did, after all, closely resemble his late wife. On hearing of his plans for her, Dymphna was, not surprisingly, horrified, and fled her home, with some trusted friends. People around here - as a local historian explains in this charming little local film about the well - believe that she fled to these parts, which is why this well is dedicated to her. Eventually though, her father tracked her down, and she fled further afield, this time overseas - specifically, to the little town of Geel, in Belgium.

The saint’s undoing, though, was to be the fact that she took her wealth with her. Her father tracked her down again after hearing that some of his coins were being used in the city. He turned up in Belgium and demanded, raving like the madman he had become, that she return home and marry him. When she refused he flew into a rage, drew his sword, and beheaded her on the spot.

In this seventeenth-century Flemish painting of the event, the saint’s Irish chieftain father seems to have transmuted, for some reason, into a Middle Eastern potentate:

The fact that Flemish Renaissance painters were painting epic canvases dedicated to the martyrdom of Dymphna points to an Irish saint whose reputation had spread far beyond her homeland. Certainly in Geel, she is still a well-known figure. It’s not just because of this old and disturbing story though, or even because of the cathedral which is still dedicated to her in the city today. It is - as is so often the case with Christian martyrs - because of what happened after her death, and because of it.

The story of the madness of Dymphna’s father seems to have led to people visiting her shrine for help with with their own mental disorders, or those of their loved ones. Within a few centuries, the saint’s reputation for healing the mentally ill had grown so much that pilgrimages were made to her shrine. Geel began overflowing with psychiatric patients. A hospital was built to aid them, but soon enough that was overflowing too. And so, as early as the thirteenth century, a tradition began in Geel: ordinary families across the town began taking people with psychiatric problems into their own homes as guests, to help them with their healing.

Seven hundred years on, this tradition continues. In the name of St Dymphna, this Belgian town has pioneered a model of de-institutionalised psychiatric care so well known that you’ll find stories about it in any number of mainstream media outlets - such as this one, for example, from NPR in the US. Geel has become famous worldwide for its unique system of domestic hospitality extended to victims of mental illness.

That all of this can be traced back to the life and death of a seventh century Irish Christian woman is one of those miracles that this strange and wonderful faith can so often account for. Here, in this small grove in Galway, the memory of the ‘Lily of Ireland’, whose work spread so far beyond these borders and still goes on, comes back down to earth.