Naithi's Well
Seapoint, now a popular bathing place on Dublin Bay, was once a deserted and rugged shore suited to seabirds and hermits.
Tobernea Terrace, a row of grand 4-storey Victorian houses, stands near the hermit’s well from which it got its name, Tobar Naithi (Naithi’s Well). 6th century Naithi lived a few miles inland at more accessible Taney, Tigh Naithi ( ‘House of Naithi’) but regularly withdrew to rocky Seapoint to focus on his priorities.
I had often passed the terrace in my youth and wondered at its strange name. I never saw it as my local ‘Holy Well’ and only recently I discovered its connection with Taney.
Recent efforts to find Naithi’s well at Tobernea Terrace failed because it is hidden away among bushes in a ‘Keep Out’ locked compound. Taney was more rewarding as his ‘house’ there is inside a graveyard and open to the public.
In Naithi’s time Taney was just a roadside stop south of Dublin. Now it is almost a suburb and the graveyard a record of how it developed.
Two Rathdown Slabs recall the Viking-Christian era of a thousand years ago.
The church (now COI) is still called St Naithi’s. It shelters the baptismal font of the Duke of Wellington and tapestries of the Last Supper made by two Yeats sisters, Lilly and Lolly, both of whom are buried there.
The Asylum Plot near the entrance gates was once used for patients of the Dundrum Central Mental Hospital. A back gate was originally an entrance for Catholics attending funerals at a time when they were barred from entering the main gates of a Protestant church.
Among the 10,000 buried there are Protestants and Catholics, Republicans and Government officials.
Republican graves include those of Lorcain McSuibhne, a member of the Irish Republican Army killed in 1922 and James Burke, killed in Croke Park on Bloody Sunday.
Sgt William Anthony Kavanagh, RAF Volunteer Reserve, age 24, died 23 Sep 1944 as a result of a cycling accident while home on holiday. Lying nearby is the Irish physicist George Johnstone Stoney who died in London in 1911. His ashes were brought back to be with his wife, mother and sister.
What can be found at Taney today could be called Naithi’s heritage but he himself is very much in the background. He is even confused with a saint of the same name in Sligo. However Tobernea and Taney are convincing evidence of his life in south Dublin.
If Taney reveals his legacy, Tobernea is a reminded of what he was about.
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