St. Bennan's Well
St. Bennan's Well is a holy well in the countryside 3.9 km north-west of Tuam, County Galway. Kilbennan Monastery is within 118 m.
- Kind
- Holy wells
- From Tuam
- 3.9 km north-west
The map does not yet record a phone number, a website or opening hours for St. Bennan's Well. Anyone can add them on OpenStreetMap; this page picks the change up at the next refresh.
Getting to St. Bennan's Well
- From the town
- 4.51 km by road from the Square, about 54 minutes on foot; a short drive.
- Directions from where you are
- Open the model above, tap the pin and choose “Directions here”; the route is drawn from your own position.
Around it
Other sites within 3 km: Kilbennan Monastery (118 m), Tobernalour (819 m), Lismore (1.6 km), Caltragh Fort (2.1 km) and Kilcreevanty Nunnery (2.7 km).
What a holy well is
A holy well is a spring or small pool that people hold sacred, older in most cases than the saint whose name it now carries. The water is usually said to heal, through the saint or the spirit thought to live in it, and the story often has the saint striking the spring from the ground. Wells were, and in places still are, sites of pilgrimage and small rituals: prayers, rounds walked in a set direction, and offerings left behind, with strips of cloth tied to a nearby tree in the Celtic countries.
The first book devoted to them was Philip Dixon Hardy's Holy Wells of Ireland in 1836, written as a Protestant attack on the Catholic customs he found at wells named for saints; it took until the end of that century for the term to settle into its plain modern meaning. The wells around Tuam are mapped as springs with their old names, tobar being the Irish word.
Written from Wikipedia, "Holy well" (CC BY-SA 4.0); the words are ours.
Within a short walk
- Kilbennan Monastery118 mAbbeys
Other holy wells around Tuam
- 819 m
- 3.0 km
- 4.3 km
- 4.9 km
- 5.6 km
- 6.7 km
- 7.8 km
- 8.7 km
Questions people ask
Where is St. Bennan's Well?
Are there other holy wells nearby?
Source record: OpenStreetMap node/12869253079, read on 2026-09-18. The street is the mapped address where there is one, otherwise the nearest named road. Distances are straight lines.