Lost and Found

Fifty Holy Wells, #49

St Finian’s Well, Clonmacnoise, County Offaly

I began my pilgrimage to the wells of Ireland almost exactly a year ago. The first well I visited on my fiftieth-year tour was at the hermitage of St Colman Mac Duagh, one of my favourite Irish saints. Colman lived in the woods of the Burren, in a cave under a limestone cliff, for seven years before being called out to found the monastery of Kilmacduagh, which bears his name and is the site of his grave. I spent the eve of my fiftieth birthday in Colman’s cave, which is what set me off on this tour of the waters. You can read my account of that night, and the story of St Colman, in this post from October 2022.

Two years on, I find myself at the penultimate well of my unexpected pilgrimage. This week and next week, my final two wells will be in the same location. It seemed fitting to end my wanderings in another great monastery built by another saint of the Irish Golden Age. This is Clonmacnoise, which was founded in the sixth century by St Ciaran:

Clonmacnoise sits on the banks of the Shannon at what was once a strategic crossing point. Because of its location, and the political support of the High King of Ireland, it became in its day a wealthy and important site. More than a simple monastery, it was in effect a town, inhabited not only by monks but by many laypeople and, especially, scholars. Like many other early Irish monasteries, Clonmacnoise became famous for its scholarship, manuscript production and astonishing stone and metalwork. See, for example, the Clonmacnoise Crozier:

Visit the site today and you can still see, now moved into its museum to protect them from the elements, two of the best remaining high crosses in the country. High crosses are a uniquely Irish phenomenon; though they are found also in Pictish Scotland and Anglo-Saxon England, they seem to be there as a result of Irish missionaries. Among their probable functions was their use as a teaching aid.

This is Clonmacnoise’s Cross of the Scriptures. It’s covered in Biblical scenes: useful for an illiterate population in a time when possession of any kind of book was only for the wealthy, or for select monastics:

One of the many happy side-effects of my well tour has been a much deeper immersion in the world of the early Irish church, which I knew very little about a couple of years back. I still know far too little, but then I’m just a wandering writer, not an academic historian. This, at any rate, is my excuse. What I do know is that during Ireland’s astonishing spiritually productive Christian Golden Age, which perhaps stretched from the sixth to the tenth centuries, this land produced uncountable numbers of monasteries and churches, which in turn produced uncountable numbers of saints.

I know something else too: they are still here. And all of these sites - wells, monastery ruins, high crosses and all of the rest - are a reminder of their living presence, sewn into the landscape of this island.

Christians these days, I think, need that reminder more than ever. The kind of pilgrimage I have been on around Ireland and beyond is nothing to do with ‘idol worship’ or ‘superstition’ or some attempt to ‘paganise’ the path of Christ. It is simply that reminder that God is in all things living, including our landscape. A reminder that the saints still live. A reminder that the world is a much greater mystery than we can ever fathom. I’m an Orthodox Christian, and one reason for that is that the Christian East, unlike much of the West, never lost sight of this reality. God fills all things. Matter can be blessed. Prayer works. Nature sings to us hourly of the glories of its creator. The saints live. I can prove none of it, and yet I am sure it is true.

Anyway, here we are at Clonmacnoise, the ruins of which are now a tourist destination. It’s a big site, with numerous churches, the high crosses, round towers, graveyards and more. As connoisseurs of this series, you will all know by now what this implies. That’s right - there has to be a well around here somewhere.

In fact, there turned out to be two. The question was whether I would be able to find them.

My research on Clonmacnoise revealed a pair of wells in or near the site. One of them was easy to find - we’ll end up there next week. But the other: well, this was more of a challenge. In this age of online everything, many holy wells can be found online. Some have big write-ups by official bodies, but even the more obscure often have a little mention somewhere, or a photo or two taken by a visitor. And of course, our constant companions the schoolchildren of the 1930s will often have something to tell us.

This was how I found about St Finian’s Well. Schoolboy Maurice Whyms has the details:

When St Finian came to visit at Clonmacnois He blessed a well in the middle of a field between the Church-yard and the Shannon. This well was blessed for the monks to use for cooking and it is used for such up to this day. At first it was up in the middle of the field but now it is down near the Shannon but no one knows why it moved down. It is very often covered by the Shannon when the flood rises.

This sounded intriguing. But was the well still to be found? I looked everywhere I could on the Interweb, but found nothing. No accounts, no photos. Maybe it was gone. But I wanted to be sure. So I decided to make use of one of the most dubious and yet tempting offerings that the Machine has granted to us: satellite images. Sure enough, it was but the work of a moment to find Clonmacnoise on Google Earth:

St Finian’s well, Maurice informed us a century back, was ‘down near the Shannon.’ I pored and pored over the image, zooming in and out and moving up and down the riverbank, but nothing was immediately obvious.

Until … what was that, down at the end of the line of trees leading down to the river …?

It looked promising, but there was only one way to confirm it. Off to Offaly I went, and into Clonmacnoise. Waiting until the tourists had turned the other way to take photos of the round tower, I vaulted the stone wall and headed down towards the Shannon. The ground was boggy. It didn’t look hopeful. Maybe it had just been a photo of an old tyre or something.

And then, in the shadow of the ruined castle, with the river waters lapping at it, I found what I was looking for:

What a strange one this is. It’s a circle of - what? concrete? - which presumably encloses a freshwater spring:

It is presumably unused now. Given my failed research attempts, it seems to be forgotten too. Maurice suggested a century back that this well was used by the monks for their daily water needs. What they did in the winter, when the Shannon regularly bursts its banks and would presumably drown the well, is an interesting question. But they survived, at least until the end of the Irish Golden Age. Then, due to a combination of Normans, Vikings, changing economic patterns and the Papal centralisation of power in bishoprics rather than monasteries, Clonmacnoise faded away into ruin.

What comes next? More on that next week, in our final instalment. But I’ll give you a clue: the water still runs fresh, even when it is covered by the flood.