Struell Wells, Ireland: Pagan Customs in the Modern Age? January 15, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Ancient, Medieval , trackback
Exciting article by Finbar McCormick from 2009, one that somehow passed Beach by, ‘Struell Wells’, The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland (2009), 45-62. FM begins with a careful description of a nineteenth-century Irish water shrine, the Struell Wells (Downpatrick). This shrine is credited through St Patrick with the power of curing. Crowds would gather there in the 1800s and bathe, they would then climb onto the top of St Patrick’s Chair (a rock formation) and be turned three times by a man who asked a penny for his troubles. After that, cured of tuberculosis or cancer or whatever illness was plaguing them, they would return home better men or women: possibly with a hangover because there was also much carousing at the baths.
Good, well drilled modern folklorists will tell you knowingly that, as Patrick Logan has taught us, ‘Celtic’ holy wells are nothing of the sort. They do not date back to earliest antiquity (as if!), they were an invention of the early modern age when they were draped round in fake ivy and saintly custom by put-upon Catholics. And, lo and behold the earliest reference to the baths at Struell dates to 1515, while a generation afterwards, in 1543, someone went there to do penance for strangling his son. Already by 1642 there are legends of St Patrick singing psalms in the pools there.
There are two problems with this, both of which FM exploits with joy. First, the festival did not take place on St Patrick’s day, as the dedication at the well might have demanded, but on Midsummer Night’s Day (a day with pre-Christian associations); then, second, and this one is a real teaser, those who wanted to be healed, men and women, had to enter the baths in the nude. (Memories of a fascinating Scottish parallel.) What would Queen Victoria have said?
Neither of these points sound very nineteenth-century or even very early modern. So where do they come from? FM starts, at this point, throwing Old, Middle Irish and Latin at the reader with abandon. In the Liber Hymnorum, very probably a twelfth century Irish collection, there is pre-Viking hymn, possibly from the eighth century. The hymn in question, St Patrick’s Hymn by Fiacc (attr.) talks of how Patrick used to bathe and sing psalms in a pool and the pool or a pool where he bathed is situated at ‘Slán north of Benna Bairche’. A later gloss, contemporaneous with the LH collection, makes Slán near Saul, which is just a couple of miles from Struell. Now there is no guarantee that the hymn’s author had Struell in mind, but there is no question that by, say, the twelfth century the connection had been made by the ‘glosser’ and that the bath was up and running: FM makes a more doubtful connection between a ‘flagstone’ in the hymn and St Patrick’s Chair. Tirechán, a seventh-century hagiographer, in some senses the Irish proto-hagiographer, describes a well called Slán (‘Healthy’ in Irish), in Co Mayo, where the druids ‘honoured the well and offered gifts to it as a god’. When Tirechán was writing there is, incidentally, a good chance, to judge by several Irish sources, that some druids were still banging the drum, so this information should not just be disregarded carelessly. And it is interesting to find a well with the same name connected to pre-Christian mandarins.
There is a lot of room for doubt here, of course. How many other Sláns were there in Ireland, for example? Can we borrow customs from one Slán to another? Can the stone flag in St Patrick’s Hymn really be connected to what became St Patrick’s Chair? But there seems a reasonable case here that we have evidence of continual use of a well from at least the twelfth century and perhaps from the seventh or eighth century and very possibly from a much greater pagan antiquity with customs being passed down the generations. If so those unlikely nude Victorians in the mid nineteenth century were carrying out early Christian rites (or druidic rites) in a colder and less friendly age. So much for an early modern well…
Other examples of this kind of remarkable continuity: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
16 Jan 2014: Invisible writes in: ‘On nude bathing at Struell Wells. Victorians bathing nude in the open air was not as unlikely as we might think. Victorian men and (some) women sea-bathed nude, each in their segregated areas. This was one of the functions of bathing machines–to get the bather modestly immersed before exposure. So while there may have been some mystical function to the Struell Well mixed-bathing nudity, in the early 1800s it would not have brought quite as much of a blush to the maiden cheek as it might have done from, say, the 1870s onward.’
What is remarkable about Struell is that (i) this was a holy well where nude bathing was not normal and (ii) it was mixed bathing…
18 Jan 2014: Finbar McCormick kindly answered an email. He confirmed there is now a short guide book and also that he has no regrets six years later. This is, in his view, a pagan well. He might be right. Thanks Finbar for taking the time.
18 Jan 2014: Vox Hiberionacum, one of Beach’s fave Irish bloggers writes the following critique: I’m a great admirer of Finbarr and his Struell paper is one of my favourites. I would probably share the view that although it is old, it is not as old as people think. At best, it is a very early Christian well, intimately linked with the legend and locations associated with the national saint. What people sometimes think of as ”pagan” attributes and associations are very often the products of deep christian metaphor and old testament biblical frameworks.
The whole area of Tírechán is a subject close to my heart, and McCormick is right to draw parallels with him and the Well of Slán in Co. Mayo- but perhaps right for the wrong reasons. That particular episode has long been cited by scholars looking to see the last vestiges of dying paganism in seventh century ireland. However, a detailed examination of the episode would perhaps would reveal that it has more to do with an OT portrayal of Nebuchadnezzar/idols, kingship in general, bullaun stones (mortar stones/holy water fonts) and was very likely an inauguration site similar to Struell. The modern location of the well is now lost in overgrowth, amidst a wild cemetery adjacent a church ruin that is documented in the 13thC, but had a pattern day, very similar to Struell up to the early 20thC.
McCormick highlights the Feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist association with St. John’s Eve/ midsummer/Struell. This is crucial, I think. Not in terms of any residual paganism in association, but because of the place and status of John the Baptist in early Medieval Ireland. In the 9th/10th/11thC in particular, he plays a large part in Irish eschatological fears over a prophetic apocalypse in which the Irish will be be ‘personally’ purged by a great burning. St. Johns Eve fires are still lit in some parts of the country today.
Step back to Tírechán’s Well of Slán in Mayo, and the pagan ‘prophet’ that is portrayed as lying beneath it when St. Patrick comes to visit is said to have wanted water to cover his bones forever for fear of a firey conflagration.
Slán too, is perhaps not quite what some scholars think. It does indeed mean healthy, but perhaps more often: ”whole, unimpaired, safe’ and what what probably originally meant when applied to holy wells…’saved: in a spiritual sense”
All in all, as McCormick points out, we have a location associated with the very earliest beginnings of the Saints primacy, let alone national cult. It may be missing some of the earlier medieval attestation, other than Fiacc – but by the later medieval, seems to demonstrate an awareness of very similar motifs and associations as above. For my tuppence worth, I can see it being a late medieval ‘re-working’ of an older site, precisely because of its existing longevity in the landscape and earlier inauguration association. Its actual “paganism” however, does not make sense to me, when viewed in its early medieval Christian context.
For what its worth, you might be interested in perhaps the biggest medieval irish ‘hollywood’ example of a “pagan” Slán Well. It occurs in the mythical tale of the ”Second Battle of Mag Tuired”, an 11thth/12thC reworking of probable 9thC material, concerning the conflict between magical races for Ireland. In it, a well called slán is used to heal wounded warriors, so their enemies block it up with stones. The result? The forth largest (neolithic) stone cairn in the country, located in Heapstown, Co. Sligo. A wonderful medieval mythological explanation for the presence and size of such a monument.’
Thanks Vox!
