Cromeen's Well, Ballysallagh, Co. Westmeath

It appears on the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, carefully annotated in the manner the OS reserved for features considered locally significant, wells among them. Holy wells and named springs were a fixture of the Irish countryside, often associated with patron saints, patterns (the traditional seasonal gatherings held at sacred sites), or simply long community use. Whatever Cromeen's Well once meant to the people of this part of County Westmeath, no physical trace of it remains visible today. The ground gives nothing away.

The well sat on grassland just to the west of a stream that forms the boundary between the townland of Ballysallagh and the neighbouring Toor Commons. That boundary stream is still there, doing its quiet administrative work in the landscape, but the well it once ran beside has vanished entirely, absorbed back into the ordinary field. The name itself, Cromeen, is likely a diminutive form of the Irish word crom, meaning bent or crooked, though whether it referred to a curved approach, a stooped figure associated with the site, or something else entirely is now impossible to say. What the 1837 map records is a moment of acknowledgement, a cartographer noting that this particular patch of ground had a name and a feature worth marking, even if both have since been forgotten.