The spring at Curraghakimikeen in County Limerick is not one of those. What makes it quietly striking is precisely what it lacks: the traditions, the stories, even the memory of why people stopped coming. It sits in a valley, a modest spring with a hawthorn bush beside it, and almost nothing else to explain what it once was.

The folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair recorded what little survives in 1955, drawing on the Ordnance Survey Name Books compiled around 1840. The earlier surveyors had noted the well under the name Tobernagommaun, which is the form that appeared on their maps, and they described it plainly: a spring in a valley, a hawthorn nearby. Hawthorn trees are a common feature of sacred springs across Ireland, associated in folk tradition with the boundary between the ordinary world and something older, and their presence beside a well was often taken as a marker of spiritual significance. The Name Books entry acknowledged that the site had been considered holy in earlier times, but even then the reason for its abandonment was unknown. By the time Ó Danachair was gathering material a century later, no tradition survived at all. The well had slipped entirely out of local knowledge.

The site lies in Curraghakimikeen townland in County Limerick, though reaching the precise location requires some patience with both the landscape and the maps. The 1840 Ordnance Survey sheets are the most useful reference for plotting where Tobernagommaun once appeared, and the first edition OS maps are freely available through the Irish Historical Maps viewer online. The well is a spring rather than a constructed feature, so there may be little visible to distinguish it beyond the lie of the ground and, if the hawthorn is still standing, the tree itself. Visiting in late spring, when hawthorn is in blossom, makes any such tree easier to identify and, given the association between the species and liminal or sacred places in Irish tradition, lends the site a certain atmosphere even in the absence of anything more to say about it.