No stone surround, no votive offerings hanging from a nearby thorn, no worn path through the grass to mark it out. Saint Martin's Well, in the townland of Rathmacknee Great, appears on Ordnance Survey maps from both 1839 and 1925, identified in gothic lettering on each edition, yet the site has long since been absorbed into ordinary pasture. That gothic script, typically reserved for antiquities of note, hints at a place that once held considerable local significance.

The well's pattern, a traditional gathering at a holy site involving prayer, ritual circuits, and often festivity, was observed here for a full week each year, beginning on the 11th of November. Writing around 1840, the scholar John O'Donovan recorded that this pattern had already been suppressed, abolished around 1810, which suggests it ran for generations before the practice was brought to an end. The week-long duration is notable; most patterns elsewhere in Ireland were single-day affairs, and the scale here implies a well with a strong hold on local devotion. The well lies about 100 metres north-east of Rathmacknee church and roughly 15 metres from the eastern bank of a small stream, a low-lying, level landscape that gives little away. The dedication is to Martin of Tours, a fourth-century Roman soldier who converted to Christianity and became one of the most venerated figures in early Western monasticism. He founded what is considered the first monastery in Gaul, at Poitiers, under the patronage of Bishop Hilary, and later became Bishop of Tours in 371. He died in AD 397, and his feast day falls on the 11th of November, which explains precisely why the pattern here began on that date.