The women never spoke. They had been seen there several times before. The well they were kneeling at sits in the angle where a road meets a stream in Tulligoline North, County Limerick, a small and plainly constructed thing that might easily be missed in daylight, let alone in the small hours.

The well is known in Irish as Tobairín an Duine Bhoicht, which translates roughly as the little well of the poor person, a name that carries its own quiet weight. Its pool is keyhole-shaped, measuring 1.4 metres by 0.6 metres, lined with rubble stone and sheltered by a stone wall topped with a galvanised roof. Two stone steps on the southern side give access to the water, and a run-off channel carries the overflow away. The folklore account above was recorded from Killaghteen National School as part of the Irish Folklore Commission's Schools' Collection, a 1930s project in which schoolchildren gathered local stories and traditions from older community members, and it survives in full at duchas.ie. The folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair, who photographed the well in 1954, noted in a 1955 publication that rounds were made at the well formerly, especially in May, and that the water was believed to cure sore eyes. Rounds refers to the traditional devotional practice of walking a set circuit around a sacred site while praying, often performed on a patron saint's feast day or another significant date in the calendar.

By the time Ó Danachair visited, no devotional objects were present at the site, and the same appears to be true today. The well sits unobtrusively at the roadside, its galvanised roof the most visible indicator of its presence. The photographs taken by Ó Danachair in 1954 are held in the National Folklore Collection at UCD and are accessible through the duchas.ie archive, offering a useful sense of how little the structure has changed. May remains, historically, the month most associated with this well, though the hooded figures of the folklore seem to have kept no particular season.