St. Scoheen's Well in Freneystown, County Kilkenny, is notable precisely because none of that is present. No votive offerings rest on the floor of the spring. No local tradition of cures has survived, and no pattern, the communal ritual gathering of prayer and often festivity that once animated holy wells across the country, is observed here. The well is still recognised as a holy well, still carries the name of its saint, and yet the devotional life that would ordinarily surround such a place has, at some point, simply stopped.

The site sits within a layered landscape of some complexity. Approximately sixty metres to the east lies an early medieval church and its associated graveyard, suggesting that the well and the earliest Christian activity in this townland are broadly connected. The natural spring itself, however, has been absorbed into the southern section of a nineteenth-century graveyard wall, the wall belonging to a later, medieval church and its own separate graveyard. In other words, the well now occupies the boundary of a much more recent piece of ecclesiastical infrastructure, its origins considerably older than the stonework that now frames it. The saint whose name it carries, Scoheen, is obscure; no widely recorded life or feast day appears to have kept the association vivid for later generations, which may go some way towards explaining why the well's cult did not persist.