Description
There are 358 holywells recorded in the Archaeological Inventory for County Cork and Amanda Clarke has spent 7 years visiting them all at least once. She has found them by roads in City, town and village, seeking them out down boreens and up mountains; on cliffs and by the seashore; across fields and in copses; in bullauns, earthfast rocks, trees and lakes.
In her lively and accessible style she records the characteristics of the County’s holy wells, the stories of patron saints and their sometimes not so saintly deeds, the spiritual rituals, devotions and rounds of the faithful and the often profane partying and faction fighting that followed pattern days in the past. Supported by local knowledge and painstaking research into historical archives and other sources she looks at water, holy trees, miraculous cures, offerings, and occasional appearances of auspicious fish. A representative set of examples of individual holy wells is included in more detail and the book is richly illustrated with photographs, mostly taken by the author herself.
