The small well at Ballynabanoge in County Limerick is a little different. Its recorded fame rests not on curing people, but on curing animals, specifically livestock troubled by sore eyes. That is an unusual enough distinction to make it worth pausing over.

The well appears on the Ordnance Survey map of 1840 under the name Banoge Well, which suggests it was already well established in local knowledge by that point. When the folklorist and scholar Caoimhín Ó Danachair documented it in 1955, he was drawing on earlier Ordnance Survey Name Books, the field notes compiled by surveyors in the nineteenth century, which recorded local lore alongside topographical detail. Those notes described a pool roughly three feet, or about 0.9 metres, in diameter, ringed by whitethorn bushes. Holy wells in Ireland were typically associated with a patron saint whose feast day drew pilgrims for rounds of prayer, a practice known as a pattern. This well had no such patron on record, and by the time Ó Danachair visited, no devotional activity was taking place at all. It had been quietly repurposed as a source of domestic water supply, carrying its old reputation with it into the everyday.

Ó Danachair photographed the well in 1954, and those images are held by the National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin, where they can be viewed through the Dúchas digital archive at duchas.ie. The well sits in the townland of Ballynabanoge, and the whitethorn, or hawthorn, bushes noted in the original survey description are a common marker of such sites across Ireland, where thorns growing beside a well were often considered sacred and left undisturbed. Anyone seeking out the site today should expect a modest and undemonstrative place, far from any formal heritage trail, with nothing to announce its former purpose beyond, perhaps, those same persistent bushes.