The one at Killanafinch, in County Tipperary, offers none of that. It has been entirely swallowed by the landscape, flooded out of existence so completely that nothing remains above ground to mark where it once stood.

The site lies in a low-lying marshy area, with a stream running east to west close by, and it is the combination of soft ground and rising water that has erased it. What we know of the well comes from the Ordnance Survey Name Books, the nineteenth-century field records compiled as surveyors mapped and documented Ireland townland by townland. Those records describe a place that was once actively sought out, where people came to pray to the saints and to use the water as a cure for, in the language of the time, "divers sores and diseases". That phrasing, already retrospective when it was written down, suggests the well had already slipped from regular use by the time the surveyors arrived. It was a memory of a practice rather than a living one.

Holy wells were, and in many places still are, sites of pattern, a local word for the devotional gatherings held on a patron saint's feast day, often combining prayer with the ritual circumambulation of the well itself. At Killanafinch, even that context has been lost. There is no saint's name attached to the site in what survives of the record, no feast day, no surviving tradition of pilgrimage. The well exists now only as a coordinate in a marsh and a few lines of nineteenth-century text describing something that had already largely passed.