You can safely park at the layby that is about 75 m down from the cache site towards Corofin. Please be very careful when walking down to the holy well, as the site is on a bend and the road is fairly narrow and quite busy. Access is through a stile in the wall surrounding the well area.
Just in case the reading you get from your GPS points you to a drystone wall - don't start dismantling it. It is not in there. It is also not in the white box on the tree. See hint! I had to relocate the PET from its former hiding spot to another one. The coordinates are the same.
In the Book of the Burren, this holy well is called St. Fleming's Well but it is unclear why as there is no such saint. The well is known locally (as well as in all documentary sources) as Tobar Iníne Baoith, the well of the daughter of Baoith - like quite a few others in this area around Kilnaboy.
This is a beautiful spot with an old blessed tree which carries a little shrine on its trunk, and a well house.
The holy well has played a central role in the spiritual and social lives of the Irish for several centuries. The well was an especially important part of agrarian folk tradition in the 18th and 19th centuries. Though well worship is still robust at a small number of sites, the overall picture is one of dramatic decline in the last 150 years or so. Many wells are physically neglected now and the oral lore associated with them is dying with our elders.
It is commonly estimated that there are upwards of 3,000 holy wells in Ireland – a staggering total. There is a disproportionately high number of holy wells in County Clare – about 220. The Burren region in North Clare/South East Galway boasts about 45 wells – again a higher than average concentration.
Holy wells can have three diagnostic features. They are the divine water, the blessed tree and the stone.
The cult of water in Ireland can be traced back to the Bronze Age (c. 2000-600 BC) at least. Many sacrificial deposits have been found in our lakes and rivers dating from that period. This form of religious expression to the gods continued into the Iron Age (c.600 BC – 400 AD). The most spectacular water find from the Iron Age is the Loughnashade trumpets. Four sheet-bronze trumpets were found in Loughnashade lake in County Armagh.
At some point our ancestors began to express public worship at shrines around specific water bodies. These small-scale shrines are known as holy wells. However, their precise origins remain obscure and can be hotly contested. Only a limited number of wells have been excavated and the findings have not shed convincing light on the vexed subject of their origins.
Other points of interest in the parish of Kilnaboy are the church on the main road which has a double cross (Templar symbol?) on the gable and a Sheela-na-gig over the door, as well as a destroyed round tower. Further down the road, towards Lemaneh Castle and Kilfenora, there is the replica of a Tau cross, one of two in Ireland.
This cache is part of the Holy Well series which is open to everyone; if you know a holy well you would like to place a cache at then please contact Burrentracker through Geocaching.com. This is to keep track of the numbers of the holy wells and give you the general format for the cache page. If you currently have a published cache at a holy well that you would like to include in the series, get in contact with me, Burrentracker, and I can add it to the list.