The contrast is quietly telling: an ancient source of water, venerated long enough to accumulate a set of very specific customs, now framed in mid-twentieth-century cement with a signpost to make sure you know whose well it is.

The well at Cartrongolan was a site of local pilgrimage on the first of August, the second Sunday of August, and the fifteenth of August, a clustering around Lughnasa that is common to many Irish holy wells and reflects the long overlap between pre-Christian harvest observance and the Catholic liturgical calendar. Pilgrims came to seek cures for warts and other skin complaints, a tradition associated with dozens of wells across Ireland where particular springs were believed to carry healing properties. The ritual actions recorded here follow a familiar pattern: coins and pins thrown into the water, and a rag tied to the bush beside it. These so-called clootie offerings, strips of cloth left on trees or bushes near a well, are found at sacred water sources across Ireland, Scotland, and beyond. The idea, broadly, is that the ailment passes into the cloth and fades as the cloth rots. Pins, meanwhile, appear repeatedly in well customs and may relate to older votive deposit traditions. The specifics here were recorded by Devaney in 1981, by which point the concrete shrine was presumably already in place, rehousing something considerably older.