The One That Got Away

Fifty Holy Wells, #10

The Aylward Well, Ballynagar, County Galway

As a child, Big Houses bored me to death. By ‘Big Houses’ I mean what we English call ‘stately homes’: vast piles built by the aristocracy and gentry from the early modern period, which reached their pomp in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My homeland is studded with these things. They were the status symbols which demonstrated the wealth, prestige, proper connections and landed power of the once-ruling elites. Today’s elites prefer to signal their status by firing themselves into space or buying up half the Internet, but back then it was all about having the right type of bouillon spoon and being invited to the correct dances in the pile next door.

This is the sort of thing I mean:

Yes, it’s ‘Downton Abbey’. Don’t pretend you haven’t seen it.

I was always a history lover, but a young boy has no interest in bouillon spoons or walled gardens or any other such pap. If I was going to visit an old house, I wanted it to be a proper castle, with suits of armour and spiral staircases I could run up and down, and a gift shop that sold wooden swords. Alas, sometimes I would instead be dragged against my will to National Trust properties, to walk (not run) along endless corridors lined with big dark portraits of frowning men in wigs staring down at me.

I don’t suppose any of my Irish friends had the same problem when they were children. This is not because such houses weren’t built here: they were, in large numbers. But then, in the 1920s, the Irish - perhaps feeling the same way I used to - burnt almost all of them down.

Today, while England is still beaded with Downton-type ‘visitor experiences’, the Irish countryside is full of things like this:

What remains of the Irish aristocracy

Between 1916 and 1923, during the Irish revolution and ensuing civil war, an estimated 275 of these ‘Big Houses’, most of them the homes of hated Anglo-Protestant landlords in overwhelmingly Irish Catholic areas, were burned to the ground by the IRA. You can read more about that story here. What it means on the ground is that today’s Ireland is not only studded with the remains of Big Houses, but with the remnants of other things associated with them: untended graveyards, empty Protestant churches, rotting farm buildings, silent stable blocks - and sometimes, forgotten holy wells.

When I first stumbled into a little hidden woodland in the unremarkable townland of Ballynagar in east Galway, looking for the ‘holy well’ marked on my map, I got more than I bargained for, at least after my eyes had adjusted. The place is a hilly warren of poplar and ash, carpeted with bluebells, so blazingly green that for a while I couldn’t see anything but trees and bluebell leaves and a few protruding rocks.

But then I saw something else:

From behind, this just looks like an outcrop of rock. Walk around and down the little hill though, and it reveals itself as something else: a walled-up crypt. But whose? And where is the well I came to find? There are markings on the front of this old Romantic tomb, but the words and symbols are too worn to offer any clues - though the faded figure on the top must be either a flying angel or a crucified/resurrected Christ:

Wandering further around the stumbly, ragged woodland, you begin to notice that the things you thought were rocks sticking out of the ground are in fact more graves. Many of them, protruding sadly from the bright green carpet of leaves. Graves like this one, covered in moss, worn and faded again, but intact enough to make out a crucifixion, with a ladder leaning against the cross on the left, and a lance headed for Jesus’s side on the right:

The wood is full of these graves. Whose are they? They seem to be the graves of people with means: these carvings can’t have been cheap. But all these people seem forgotten. Nobody is tending this place. And where is the well?

After I while, I find it:

It’s a spring, emerging from the ground to create a pool and a fresh-flowing stream, hidden humbly in a cleft in the woods. It’s clogged with leaves and branches, which I clear from the pool. There are no signs of any visitors, now or for a long time: no statues, no rag trees, no coins. Nothing but the gently moving water and the leaf mould, the silent graves and the greenness of this unwalked wood.

It takes me a while, on returning home, to uncover the facts about what I have found but it turns out to be, as I suspected, the remains of a Big House. The tomb is that of the Aylwards, a family who lived in Aylward House, on the other side of the road from the wood and the well. This would presumably have been their family graveyard. The well, I discover, was once dedicated to Mary. A small chapel was built next to it, which has since dissolved back into the woodland floor. Now, it seems, nobody comes here: not to pray at the well, and not to remember the Aylwards. Time has passed them by much sooner than they must have thought it would. Their world - humming with confidence just over a century ago - has utterly dissolved.

But there is a twist in this tale, and it’s one that makes it a little bit cheerier. Aylward House, as I discover after a bit more snooping and peering, online and on the roadside and in the hedgerows, was not, in fact, burned. The Aylwards were not Protestant planters from Britain, but Irish landlords displaced from the fertile southeast by Oliver Cromwell, who sent so many Catholics, in his own words, ‘to hell or to Connacht.’ The Aylwards ended up in Connacht, and during the Irish rising their house was a base for rebel scouts and IRA supporters rather than British loyalists.

And so, Aylward House was spared and still stands, not so far from the disintegrating tombs of those who once lived in it. The Aylwards themselves sold up in the 1990s, but like the building, the family itself apparently still stands too, somewhere else in Ireland. Not all the Big Houses are gone, after all.

Aylward House today