Hello all,
During the week before Easter I went with a small group
of parishioners to visit two of the holy wells near here. On Wednesday
evening, the six of us went to St. Caillin's Well, near Ballyconneely,
and on Good Friday we went up to St. Patrick's Well at Maumeen, near Recess.
St. Caillin is especially revered by local fisherman.
The well is near the shore of the sea beyond Ballyconneely, almost to Slyne
Head. We did the stations as they would be done on the feast day, which
I think is November 13th -- barefooted we went seven times around the first
station and then the well, reciting our prayers and dropping a stone to
mark each circuit.
The main celebration at St. Patrick's Well is on the first
Sunday of August, but there is also a custom of doing the Stations of the
Cross there on the afternoon of Good Friday. It was a mild, dry day, mostly
bright, with a good breeze from the west moving the clouds along. We drove
out the Galway Road to a road that turns off into the Maumturks about a
mile past Recess. After about two miles it reaches the foot of the Maumturks,
and above is the pass of Maumeen and St. Patrick's Well. We left the car
there but the road goes on, bearing away to the left along this side of
the Maumturks, down the Inagh valley, and after several miles bears left
again to join the main road at Lough Inagh, going down the valley to Kylemore.
The track from the road up to Maumeen is about a mile,
and the pass, with the Maumturks on either side of you and the Bens at
your back, is at something less than a thousand feet. At the top of the
pass, above it on the mountain side, is a very small chapel, and the well
itself and the fourteen Stations of the Cross just below it. There were
about two hundred people there that afternoon, most of them from the Inagh
Valley and from the Maam Valley and Maam, on the other side of the pass.
The devotions were lead, in Irish and English, by Father McGrael, who also
leads the services on the first Sunday of August. Mountain and sky around
you, bog and lake below, it was as in the Van Morrison song, "He lifts
me up/ Turns me around/ Sets my feet back/ On higher ground."
Spring is well along here -- the furze on the hillsides
in full bloom and the white thorn in leaf. The daffodils have come and
are almost gone, but the ones that Brother Oswald planted all along the
Ballyconneely Road near the Community School are still strong and bright.
The fishing is improving. A couple days ago I cycled out
to Derrylea Lough, just a few miles out the Galway Road, and in about an
hour I had three trout. I used a cast with three flies -- a Bibio, a Black
Pennell, and a Connemara Black -- and got one on each, the fish, if not
of great size, being democratic in their small way. And the larks are singing
high above the bog now, long staves of song, long tales they seem, maybe
of the first coming of the larks to middle earth, or maybe of before.
From Tullyvoheen, good night and God bless you.
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