Tobernalour
Tobernalour is a holy well in the countryside 3.2 km north-west of Tuam, County Galway.
- Kind
- Holy wells
- From Tuam
- 3.2 km north-west
- Parking
- Car park, 685 m away
The map does not yet record a phone number, a website or opening hours for Tobernalour. Anyone can add them on OpenStreetMap; this page picks the change up at the next refresh.
Getting to Tobernalour
- From the town
- 5 km by road from the Square, about 60 minutes on foot; a short drive.
- By car
- Park at the car park, 685 m away. Tuam is 30 km from Galway city on the N17.
- 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 (706 m), St. Bennan's Well (819 m), Lismore (2.2 km), Tober Kitty (2.4 km) and Lisheennanisk (2.5 km).
What a holy well is
The name begins with tobar, the Irish for a well.
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.
Other holy wells around Tuam
- 819 m
- 2.4 km
- 4.3 km
- 4.7 km
- 4.9 km
- 7.2 km
- 8.4 km
- 9.1 km
Questions people ask
Where is Tobernalour?
Are there other holy wells nearby?
Source record: OpenStreetMap node/12869273785, read on 2026-09-18. The street is the mapped address where there is one, otherwise the nearest named road. Distances are straight lines.