What is recorded here

No one knows when the water first ran clean beside St James's Chapel, but people drank from it and believed it until a mill race cut through the living rock. The bridge and wheels took the water for themselves, and the holy well disappeared under ordinary industry. What remains is a absent place, remembered only through the loss of its water.

Some 50m S of St James's Chapel (GA094-038---- ). Briefly mentioned in OS Letters as 'St. James's Well ... destroyed by a mill race made about 40 years ago' (O'Flanagan 1927a, Vol. 1, 341). No visible surface trace survives. The above description is derived from the published 'Archaeological Inventory of County Galway Vol. I - West Galway'. Compiled by Paul Gosling (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1993). Date of upload: 05 August 2010

Linked to St. James, the well was traditionally associated with healing and pilgrimage, though no specific cures are recorded. It was reportedly destroyed in the late 19th or early 20th century to make way for a mill race.

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