Johnny still taking care of St Flannan’s Well

RICH in iconography and bathed in sunshine and silence last week, St Flannan’s Well in Drimanure has changed a lot since its namesake roamed the Clare countryside.

 

“St Flannan came to a place where he would have no noise or anything to distract him. You haven’t seen such a quiet or nice place to spend a couple of hours,” explains Johnny Barry, who lives nearby and has served as unofficial caretaker of the site for the past 70 years.

“A priest went back as far as he could to 640 AD and St Flannan. From Killaloe to Kildysart and from Kildysart to Kilrush, St Flannan had monasteries and at that time, there were no roads and he would have been moving from Killaloe to Kildysart to Kilrush and to Kilmacduagh outside Gort and we would have had masses and sessions at St Flannan’s Well on his way from A to Z,” he adds.

“It is marked on the well, 640, but who knows, it could be 652,” he adds.

At 84, the specifics of time are not particularly important to Johnny. As he sees it, “I’m out of the world of time now and when I’m at the well, my time is my own. I was in the world of time long enough.”
Johnny goes to the well once a day, sometimes more, to keep things in order but according to himself, “you couldn’t call it a job. It is only clipping the hedge, that’s only half a day’s work. Sweeping it maybe, that is another piece of a day.

“It being an old well and looked after and cared for by people before us, I wouldn’t like to see it going to ruin but probably if I didn’t do it, someone else would do it,” he says.

On Friday, people from the parish of Inagh-Kilnamona gathered for mass at the well. Neighbours gathered and chatted as some muttered prayers and walked the worn path around the well itself. Those petitioning make the circle five times, clockwise.
“Several visit the well and none would say what relief or what they were looking for and you can’t ask them. But there is a lot coming there and they tell you they get great relief from the problems,” Johnny says.

Despite uncertainty around the benefits of the well, people keep coming back.
“There are people up there all the time. Even last night there were people there and before the day is gone, you’d see more people up there and on Sundays, you would see a lot going up there,” Johnny notes.

The trees around the well are adorned with pictures and paintings, some framed, some faded with the sun and rain. Among the crowd of icons and statues stands a set of well-maintained stations of the cross encircling the well.
“The stations were donated by a family from Michigan, whose people came from our house below,” explains Johnny, who erected them with the help of his grandson, Jack, and son-in-law, John Shannon.

The family connection has always been there. Johnny has traipsed the path to the well since he was a boy and his family followed in his footsteps. Two of his daughters, Mairéad and Noreen, recall the importance of the well in their childhood.
“Mammy used to go up every morning before getting the eight of us up for school, that would be before 7am,” explains Noreen.

A plaque commemorates Monica Barry on the wall of the well.

With the entrance just feet from the family home, the well provided work and adventure in equal measure for Noreen and her seven siblings.
“We might be sent up to clean up around the well. Then, when we were finished, we might hide up there too until after dad went to work so we would get no extra jobs. We would be delighted with ourselves,” she adds.

While the location of the well is adjacent to Johnny’s own farm, he is keen to stress it is something beloved by the community.
“The well is an important part of the parish, of the county. Everyone has heard about St Flannan’s Well. You have the school in Ennis called after St Flannan, the cathedral in Killaloe and the national school in Inagh,” he highlights.

“When I go up there, I’d stay and say a prayer. The well is visited very often by the locals and it is noted all over the county,” he concludes.