Small health pilgrimages: Place and practice at the holy well

Abstract

While established pilgrimage sites have extensive literatures, holy wells are less well documented, yet remain significant sites of pilgrimage with healing associations within more localised settings (Rattue 1995). Health geographers describe such settings as therapeutic landscapes where established reputations for healing are central to the production of place (Gesler 2003). Drawing from a sample of holy wells in Ireland, the operation of holy wells as markers of mind/body/spirit health is explored through a deep mapping of place. Taking account of material, symbolic and inhabited dimensions of wells, they are explored under three parallel themes. Retreat is identified as a core aspect of the well visits informed by phenomenological engagements and material spaces of the well where stillness forms the basis of a spiritual health practice (Conradson 2007). The histories of the wells also contain surprisingly liminal and carnivalesque recreational elements wherein the sacred mingled regularly with the profane. Finally, well pilgrimages connect to a range of scale issues around their position as between special-and-everyday spaces within which heterogeneous healing practices emerge. In the sustenance and revival of holy well visits, the notion of the small pilgrimage as a performance of health emerges to broaden our understanding of the wider pilgrimage process.

Sacred Spaces, Healing Places: Therapeutic Landscapes of Spiritual Significance

“…Each person seeking healing is allowed to find his/her own way of performing in these spaces, either using the traditional methods or by making an individual path through the healing process. The components of health performance are shaped here, as Foley (2010) has asserted in his work: by bodies, cultures, spaces and economics. While the site is small and the folklore centre struggles to stay open each year, the economics of Killin are intertwined with the mill and the presence of the healing stones.…”

“…At the Bield, several options are available for alleviation from art therapy and Ignatian counselling to the laying on of hands. Motivations for visiting therapeutic landscapes such as shrines and places of retreat are multiple and diverse but the expectation that some benefit may be derived from the visit and from activity there is evident, as the work of Foley (2013Foley ( , 2010, Williams (2010) and Gesler (2003) demonstrates.…”

“…It became a well-established concept for geographers and social science researchers (Williams 1998(Williams , 2010Rose 2012;Foley 2013). Gesler's early work in particular was concerned with physical locations considered to be beneficial to healing and well-being in health settings (1992).…”

“…Dewsbury and Cloke (2009) refer to "spiritual landscapes", which, for the authors, means moving beyond religion to "open out spaces that can be inhabited, or dwelt in different registers" (696), echoing Foley's (2010) reference to the interplay of meanings for particular sites. Spiritual landscapes, as Dewsbury and Cloke identify them, are slightly different from sacred spaces.…”

“…Massey (2005) argues for configuring space as "always in process" and for the acknowledgement of the multiplicities, "fractures" and "dynamism" of space (11). Sacred spaces are beyond simple dualisms or narrow definitions of religious sites, and this is one aspect of Foley's (2010) work on holy wells in Ireland that is particularly exciting: the "interplay of individual and cultural meanings" (175). It is the locational and relational interplay of such meanings that contribute to the significance of a site.…”