Connla’s Well

There is a spring at the bottom of the sea that has never once gone sluggish. Nine hazels lean over it, and they are doing the thing no hazel does, carrying leaf and blossom and ripe nut all at the same moment, in the same hour, over and over. When the nuts are ready they drop. They scatter on the surface, the salmon come up under them, and where the fish have fed the water goes to foam. That foam is the whole reason anyone has ever wanted to find the place.

The Irish called it imbas, and it is not information. It is the sudden knowing that lets a poet open his mouth and have the right words already in it, the thing a trained *file* spent years learning to summon and still could not summon on demand. The medieval poem that describes the well says the nuts break down into *na bolca immaiss*, the bubbles of inspiration, and that they come out on the green-flowing streams every hour of every day, whether or not anybody is standing there to catch them.

Getting there is the difficulty. The texts cannot agree where it is. One poem on the Shannon puts it under the pleasant sea, in the domain of Condla; the companion poem puts it under the blue-rimmed ocean; other accounts place it in the Land of Promise or the Land of Youth, and one strand of the place-lore locates a Connla’s Well on solid ground near Tipperary. The medieval writers were not being careless. An Otherworld well is not supposed to hold still on a map. It is supposed to be the kind of thing you arrive at rather than travel to.

Nobody says who Connla was. The name is an ordinary man’s name in Ireland and remains one, and no surviving story attaches a person to the well that carries it. The poem only implies that the sea floor is his ground and that it is fitting for the well to be there. The stream count is no steadier: one poem gives seven streams rising from it, its companion gives six with the Shannon as the seventh, and the tale of Cormac’s journey to the Land of Promise gives a fountain with five streams running out of it, which Manannán mac Lir explains to the king as the five senses, telling him that nobody has knowledge who does not drink from the fountain and from the streams both.

The tellings are similarly slippery about whether this is one well or two. The Boyne rises from a well in the *síd* of Nechtan, guarded by three cup-bearers with the pleasant names of Flesc, Lesc and Luam, and that water is called Segais. The Shannon rises from Connla’s Well, and Segais is named there too, as the lore in the water and as the stream that runs off it. Later readers have been merging the two for centuries, and the poems half invite it.

What the poems are certain about is what happens to the people who go. Sinann, daughter of Lodán son of Lér, had everything a woman of the Tuatha Dé Danann could want except the one gift, and she went for it. She came to the river one day and saw the bubbles going past on the green water, beautiful and unhurried, and she went in after them. In the other poem the well itself reacts, fleeing back from her with a clear sound through the murmur of its own musical lore, and she chases the stream of Segais until she reaches the river’s brink and meets, in Edward Gwynn’s flat and perfect phrase, destruction and utter frustration. She drowns. The river keeps her name and has kept it since.

Boand fared worse in a more specific way. She walked three times around Nechtan’s forbidden well, and three waves came up out of it, one for each circuit and one for each limb: a wave against her foot, a wave against her perfect eye, and a third that shattered a hand. She ran for the sea to get away from what had been done to her face, and the cold white water came after her the whole way from the mound to the coast. That water is the Boyne.

So the well grants what it promises, and the price is that you stop being a person. Sinann and Boand are not punished with ignorance. They become the two greatest rivers in Ireland, which is to say they become the streams that carry the imbas out to everybody else, permanently and to no further benefit of their own. Nobody in the medieval record drinks at the well and walks home.

Its powers are simple and generous and entirely indirect. Drink the water, eat the nuts, or eat a salmon that ate the nuts, and the knowledge is yours; the salmon reportedly carry a spot for every nut they have swallowed, so the fish themselves keep the tally. This is the pipework behind the Salmon of Knowledge and behind every Irish story in which wisdom arrives through the mouth. The limits are equally plain. The well is watched, in the Segais tellings, by a keeper who permits nobody but himself and his three servants. It will not stay in one place long enough to be visited on purpose. It rises against anyone who comes at it wrong, and the poems never quite specify what wrong is, which is the most frightening thing about it. And its produce is easier to meet downstream than at the source, drifting past on a cold river as bubbles, where anyone might see it and be tempted to follow.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Connla’s Well?

Connla’s Well is a well of wisdom in the Irish Otherworld, described in the medieval place-lore poems known as the Dindsenchas. Nine hazel trees drop their nuts into it, salmon in the water eat them, and the resulting bubbles carry imbas, the inspired knowledge of poets, out along the streams that flow from it. It is named as the source of the River Shannon.

Where is Connla’s Well?

The sources place Connla’s Well in the Otherworld rather than at a fixed location, and they do not agree on which part. The poems on the Shannon put it beneath the sea in the domain of Condla, while other accounts set it in the Land of Promise or the Land of Youth, and one strand of the place-lore names a Connla’s Well near Tipperary.

Who was Connla, and what happened at the well?

No surviving story identifies the Connla the well is named for; the name is simply an ordinary Irish man’s name. The best-known event at the well is the death of Sinann, a woman of the Tuatha Dé Danann and daughter of Lodán son of Lér, who went seeking imbas, followed the bubbles into the water and drowned. The River Shannon takes its name from her.

Is Connla’s Well the same as the Well of Segais?

The medieval texts run the two together without ever settling the question. The Well of Segais is the well in the mound of Nechtan that gives rise to the River Boyne, and the Shannon poems also use the name Segais for the lore in Connla’s Well and for the stream flowing from it. Some sources treat them as one well with two names, and some keep them apart.

Related Entries

Boann, Salmon of Knowledge, Manannán mac Lir, Dagda, Aengus Óg, Finn mac Cumhal, Nuada, Sídhe, Mímir