Toberloughlaun, Cliddaun, Co. Kerry

It does not look like much. It was once a powerful spring, known locally as Tobar Lochneáin, and it drew people from considerable distances who believed its water could restore failing eyesight. By the time a survey team recorded the site in 1986, the spring itself had gone; what remained was the hollow, the overgrowth, and the memory.

The well sits in what local tradition calls the well-field, land that passed through the hands of the Sheehan and McCarthy families. Patterns, the ritual circumambulations of a holy site known as rounds, were performed here on Good Fridays, as recorded in the Ordnance Survey Name Books, which describe a place where inhabitants gathered specifically to commemorate the crucifixion. According to one account, the practice continued until around 1930. Two distinct clusters of folklore attach to the site. One concerns a man from Castleisland who bathed his eyes in the water and was cured of a chronic ailment. Another, collected separately from Currans School and from a Neilus Daly of Coolnacalliagh, involves a servant who drew water from the well without knowing its nature, then found it would not boil no matter how large a fire she made. A trout was discovered in the water, and both water and fish were returned to the well. The priest, once informed, blessed the well. The two versions differ slightly in detail, one mentioning a statute being held in the house at the time, but the trout and the refusal to boil are consistent across them. A third tradition, recorded by O'Hare in 2000, names the holy man believed to have originally blessed the well as Feidhlim, whose church is said to have stood nearby. The place-name Kilfelem, mentioned in the schoolchildren's account, likely preserves that dedication, kil being an anglicisation of the Irish cill, meaning a small early church or cell.