The spring on the north-east-facing slope of Johnstown Hill in County Wicklow has none of that. No carved surround, no patron saint's name on a weathered plaque, no tying-on of cloth strips. It is simply an unmarked spring rising quietly from the hillside, its sacred or at least significant status preserved only in its place-name.

That name carries an unusual implication. According to the toponymist Liam Price, writing in 1967, it most likely translates as 'well of the foreigner' or 'well of the Englishman'. In the Irish place-name tradition, terms for foreigner often referred to newcomers of Norse, Norman, or later English origin, and the distinction mattered enough to local communities that it was embedded in the landscape itself. A well named for its association with an outsider, rather than with a saint or a miracle, sits at an odd angle to the conventions of holy well culture in Ireland, where spiritual patronage and curative reputation were usually the point. Whether this spring was ever a site of pilgrimage or pattern-day observance, or whether the 'holy' designation reflects something older and less doctrinally tidy, the surviving record offers no answer. What remains is the name, the slope, and the water still finding its way to the surface.