Yet that is precisely what survives at Ballinlough in County Limerick, a site whose ordinariness is, in its own way, quietly telling. The well was once credited with curing stomach pains, a fairly specific therapeutic reputation of the kind that kept such places in local use long after the formal church calendar had moved on. By the time anyone thought to write it down properly, the devotions had already lapsed.

The folklore scholar Caoimhín Ó Danachair recorded the well in 1955, noting that it appeared on the Ordnance Survey map of 1840 under the name St James Well, which places its documented history within the broader nineteenth-century mapping project that first committed many such sites to paper. The dedication to St James is not unusual in an Irish context, though it sometimes reflects proximity to a Jacobean patron or a local cult rather than any direct connection to the apostle. Ó Danachair's note is spare: a small well, an open field, a memory of healing, and the observation that devotions had long since ceased. He also photographed the site in 1954, and those images are held by the National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin, accessible through the Dúchas archive online.

The well is located in the Ballinlough area of County Limerick. Because it sits in open farmland rather than within a demarcated heritage site, anyone hoping to visit should be aware that access may depend on private land and the goodwill of local landowners. The Dúchas photographic records, catalogued under reference numbers F025.21.00251, F025.21.00252, and F025.21.00253, offer the clearest visual sense of what the well looked like in the mid-twentieth century and are worth consulting before any visit. What the photographs show is a well that had already shed most of the ritual apparatus that distinguishes more celebrated sites, no rag tree, no votive offerings, no stone surround, just water and ground.