'I AM VERY anxious to know if there is a St Patrick's Well in or near Dublin," inquired an apparently innocent letter to The Irish Times, simply signed "An Irish Girl", two days before St Patrick's Day in 1900, writes Karl Whitney."I believe there is one in Messrs Cantrell and Cochrane's yard," the letter continued, "but whether it is accessible or not, I do not know".
One canny reader immediately smelled a rat, presuming the letter to be a marketing ruse cooked up by the company, and wrote the following day that, “the courteous manager . . . will not, I am sure, hesitate to show “Irish Girl” the celebrated well on their premises that affords the copious draughts of water for their renowned effervescing qualities”. The letter was signed, cheekily, “An Irish Boy”.
On that same day, the company had also replied – to what was possibly its own letter – with an enthused response that confirmed Irish Girl's belief, and, perhaps, Irish Boy's. A company representative wrote that, according to a lecture once given on the subject, St Patrick's Well was located "at the rear of the houses between Nassau Place and Kildare Street, now occupied by our mineral water factory". The next day, on St Patrick's Day itself, an advert for Cantrell and Cochrane appeared in The Irish Times. A similar advert had been published on this day for many years – its florid prose informing readers that the company had "re-discovered" the well when it moved into its premises.
Perhaps, the ad suggested, the waters of the well, which were traditionally consumed for their health-giving properties every St Patrick’s Day, were somehow responsible for their brand’s contemporary fame all over the world. “There is nothing now to prevent Irishmen in both hemispheres from drowning their shamrocks on St Patrick’s Day in the waters of the most famous well of their country”, it colourfully surmised.
However, there were actually two St Patrick’s Wells; one was tucked away beneath the Nassau Street walls of Trinity College. Nassau Street’s Irish language name, Sráid Thobar Phádraig, testified to the well’s presence. It was this particular well that Jonathan Swift wrote about in his “Verses on the Sudden Drying up of St Patrick’s Well, Near Trinity College, Dublin, 1726”. The well was within the grounds of All Hallows Priory, on top of which the university had been built. Although the well was reasonably close to the premises of the mineral water manufacturer, it probably didn’t form part of its site. The well is still there, beside the university’s Nassau Street entrance.
Finding the other well had become something of an obsession for the energetic and enterprising architect Sir Thomas Drew. In addition to designing buildings such as Rathmines Town Hall in Dublin and St Anne’s Cathedral in Belfast, Drew was a keen antiquarian who undertook excavations and often presented lectures on his findings to fellow researchers.
In 1891, he had outlined his belief that St Patrick's Well had been located next to a church founded by the saint, which was known as St Patrick de Insula – Insulabeing the Latin for island. This church, he speculated, had been sited on an island in the middle of the Poddle river, to the north-west of the present site of St Patrick's Cathedral. Based on his study of various maps, drawings and descriptions of the area, Drew was able to pinpoint exactly where he thought the church, and St Patrick's Well, had stood.
The Poddle river runs from the foothills in Tallaght, underground from Kimmage to the centre of the city, past the west door of the cathedral. Its proximity to St Patrick’s had always caused problems with flooding: the graves of Jonathan Swift and his companion Stella had to be moved because of overflow from the Poddle.
On June 18th, 1901, Drew found what he was looking for. Sir Thomas, who had been undertaking restoration work on the cathedral, had informed the city surveyor, Spencer Harty, where he suspected St Patrick’s Well was situated, by the time-honoured method of making a cross on a map.
In a letter that was published in this newspaper a week later, Drew wrote that the well “has seen the light once more . . . after centuries of oblivion”. Harty had “personally superintended the excavations at the indicated spot”, finding “the ancient causeway of Patrick Street lower by six feet than the present one”. Even today, one can still see, at the church’s west end, how much lower the present cathedral lies when compared to the street.
Drew suggested that the well had drawn Irish pilgrims even after it had fallen into neglect “under the rule of the Anglo-Norman ecclesiastics, who do not appear to have held enthusiastically in honour a mere Irish saint”. Eventually, around the end of the 16th century, it disappeared.
Two crosses “inscribed in high relief on a great granite stone” had been discovered on the spot he had indicated, while “the well itself had disappeared”, due in some part to a diversion of the river, made to drive a corn mill that had once been built against the west front of the cathedral.
That the well had dried up was, in fact, something of a mixed blessing: at the turn of the century, the Poddle, which had once fed St Patrick’s Well, “at which the great missionary saint was reputed to have baptised converts”, was notoriously and noxiously polluted.
Calling the re-discovery of the well a “recovered record of the very birth of Dublin city”, Drew suggested that a memorial be erected on the site.
Today, a plaque in the corner of St Patrick’s Park recalls the well’s existence, and the stone discovered on the site rests in the north-west corner of the cathedral, not far from where it was found.
However, on St Patrick’s Day in 1902, almost a year after the well’s discovery, a certain newspaper advert once again reminded readers how they could “drown their shamrocks” in the waters of St Patrick’s Well.