We followed close beside it to a little inn called the "Angler's Rest," set back at the edge of a pretty garden, entered through a gate with three steps, on which were graven the words of the old Irish greeting, "Cead Mile Failte," a hundred thousand welcomes. We sat down for a time at the margin of the river and watched the changing water, and then set off to find St. Senan's well.
There are really two wells. The first is in a graveyard, a few rods away, where a fragment of an old church is still standing. It is a tangled and neglected place, with the headstones tumbled every way, and bushes and weeds running riot, but the path that leads to the well shows evidence of frequent use. The well itself is merely a small hollow in an outcropping of rock--a shallow basin, about a foot in diameter, but always miraculously full of water. I don't know how the water gets into it, or whether it is true that the basin is always full, but it certainly was that day; and the legend is that whoever bathes his forehead in that water will never again be troubled with headache, provided that he does it reverently, with full belief, and with the proper prayers. The well is shadowed by a tall hawthorn bush, and this bush is hung thick with cheap rosaries and rags and hairpins and bits of string and other tokens placed there by the true believers who had tested the wonderful properties of the water. We tested them, too, of course, and added our tokens to the rest.
The principal well is a little farther up the road, set back in a circle of trees and approached by a short avenue of lindens. It is a far more important well than the other--is one of the most famous in Ireland, indeed--and is covered with a little shrine, which you will find pictured opposite the next page. The shrine is hung with rosaries and crowded with figurines and pictures of the Virgin and of various saints, among which, I suppose, the learned in such matters might have picked out Saint Senan, who blessed this well and gave it its miraculous power. The trees which encircle the glade in which the well stands are also hung with offerings--sacred pictures, rosaries, small vessels of gilt, and the crutches of those who came lame and halting and went away cured. On either side of the entrance is a bench where one may sit while saying one's prayers, and in front of the shrine is a shallow basin, some two feet wide and a yard long, into which the water from the well trickles, and where one may sit and wash all infirmities away. The water is held to be especially efficacious in curing rheumatism and hip disease and diseases of the joints; and I only hope the cripples who left their crutches behind them never had need of them again.