Tobar Phádraig, the spring that named the place
St Patrick's well
The holy well sits on the Main Street next to the village garage, not - as you might expect - in the church grounds. It is one of countless wells across Ireland carrying St Patrick's name. Set into the wall around it is a roughly two-foot limestone plaque carved with the saint standing on a serpent, a book in his left hand and a triple cross in his right; the inscription credits a Thos. McNamara and S. Breay. The carving is old and was broken at some point - local tradition blames Cromwell's men or a soldier in 1798 - then repositioned. Within living memory a large elm stood behind the well, hung with rags, medals and pictures left by people seeking cures for sores, toothaches, even sick cattle. The Community Council restored the well in 2002. It is a five-minute stop, not a destination, but it is the literal origin of the village.
Gold and black, twenty county titles
Patrickswell GAA
Patrickswell GAA was founded in 1943 and is one of the great hurling clubs of Limerick - twenty Limerick Senior Hurling Championships (the most recent in 2019) and two Munster Senior Club titles in 1988 and 1990. The grounds are named Páirc Antóin Ó Briain. The roll of players the club has sent to the county is the real measure of it: Phil and Richie Bennis from the 1973 All-Ireland-winning side, Ciaran Carey and Gary Kirby through the 1990s, and in the modern Limerick machine that has dominated the All-Ireland, Cian Lynch, Aaron Gillane and Diarmaid Byrnes. If you pass the pitch on a summer evening there will be hurling on it.
A road village that got its quiet back
The bypass and the road
Patrickswell sat on the main Limerick-Cork artery, the old N20, and for decades the through-traffic owned the Main Street. The village was bypassed in 2001, and the old route through it became the R526. There was a railway here too once - a station on the Limerick-Tralee line, opened 1856, closed to passengers in 1963. The bigger story now is the planned M20 Cork-to-Limerick motorway, which will run parallel to the village with its own link road to keep traffic out. The whole modern history of Patrickswell is, in a sense, the history of a road deciding whether or not to go through it.