This is Saint Dermot's Well in Rathaspic, near Crumlin in County Westmeath, a holy well, that is, a natural spring venerated for its sacred or curative associations, of a kind that once dotted the Irish landscape in great numbers. What distinguishes this one is the documentary thread connecting living memory to the site: in the late 1930s, a child or local informant contributing to the Irish Folklore Commission's Schools' Collection recorded that the well had "certain cures in it," a phrase that, for all its brevity, preserves something of how the site was understood and used within living memory at that time.

The well sits within a cluster of early Christian and medieval remains that suggest this corner of Westmeath was a place of some significance for a very long time. A possible ecclesiastical enclosure lies immediately to the north-east, the kind of roughly circular boundary that often marks the footprint of an early monastic or church site. Rathaspic church and its associated graveyard stand around 200 metres to the east-north-east, and Rathaspic Castle is roughly 250 metres to the east. The name Rathaspic itself is telling: it derives from the Irish rath easpaig, meaning the fort or ringfort of the bishop, pointing to an early ecclesiastical presence in the area well before any of the surviving structures were built.

The well is accessible from the public road and a modern prayer shelter has been built beside the stream that flows from the south side of the spring. The inscribed slab recorded in the 1930s remains a feature of the site, serving as a marker both of the well's identity and of the long local habit of attaching name, story, and meaning to a place where water comes up from the ground.