New wooden sculpture trail celebrates the Saint who founded Derry

A new wooden sculpture trail in honour of Saint Colmcille has been erected in the Bogside area of the city.

The scheme is part of the Colmcille 1500 year-long commemoration marking the 1500th anniversary of the birth of Colmcille - also known as St Columba.

Around eighteen projects have received funding throughout the council area.

The latest, is situated in St Columb’s Wells, which was named after the founder of Derry.

Wooden sculptures are fixed to the gable walls of several houses in the area.

One of the houses (below), which faces on to Meenan Square, had experienced issues with graffiti over the years.

The Colmcille Wood Sculpture Project was conceived by Liam Kennedy and Judi Logue in Eden Place Arts Centre in Pilots Row.

Each sculpture is crafted from sweet chestnut; they were carved in 2013 by the nine men and women whose signatures sit at the bottom.

Artists worked with Rosaleen O’Callaghan to identify nine areas of Colmcille’s life that that they all agreed should be highlighted, and were assisted in their designs by Maire Mullan.

The sculptures were originally displayed at Pilots Row.

HISTORY

Columba is derived from the Latin word for Dove.  Colmcille is Irish and means Dove of the Church.

Columba was born around December 7, 521 at Gartan in County Donegal.

He died on June 9, 597, on the island of Iona, where he had founded his most famous monastery.

St Columb’s Wells has been associated with Colmcille since the sixth century and the holy well situated in the area is the last remaining of three dating back to medieval Derry.

The wells were named after St Colmcille, St Adhamhnan – a successor to Colmcille as Abbot of Iona and his biographer – and St Martin of Tours.

Every June 9, St Columb’s Wells is blessed and St Colmcille is asked to protect his followers, ‘who walk where he walked and pray where he prayed’.

The name of Derry’s patron saint is found throughout the city in street names and historic buildings, sometimes in the Latin form of Columba, Anglicised as Columb, or in the original Gaelic – Colmcille.

He has been especially venerated at St Columb’s Well and St Columba’s Church, Long Tower.

Since 1780 there have been houses located at St Columb’s Wells and from the 1780s onwards a distinct, and proud, community grew up in the shadow of Derry’s Walls.

Over time ‘The Wells’, as the area became known, came to include St. Columb’s Wells (built 1970s onwards), St. Columb’s Terrace (1887) and St Columb’s Street (1884).

The area was redeveloped in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the modern St Columb’s Wells was built in 1976.

The project was realised with support from the Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE), Eden Place Arts Centre, City of Culture 2013, Aras Cholmcille and Triax Neighbourhood Management Team.

And the artists themselves, Jimmy Smyth, Aileen MacManus, Connell McGinley, Helen Shiels, Masoud Baghi, Johanna Kelly, John Stevenson, Desi McKinney and Liam Kennedy.