The one at Ballywataire in County Galway offers none of that. What marks the spot is a wide, rubble-strewn hollow in the ground, roughly six metres across, sitting quietly at the base of a ridge where marshy pastureland spreads out around it. The hollow feeds a stream that runs southward, and that is more or less the whole visible picture. The restraint is, in its own way, rather striking.

Holy wells are among the oldest continuously venerated sites in the Irish landscape, often pre-Christian in origin but absorbed into the Catholic tradition by being assigned a patron saint. This one carries the name of St Patrick, the association recorded by Neary as early as 1914. Patrick is the most widely distributed patron of holy wells in Ireland, his name attached to sites from Donegal to Kerry, and Ballywataire fits into that broad pattern of Patrician devotion that mapped itself across the country over many centuries. The physical form here, a collapsed or silted hollow rather than a masonry-lined basin, suggests something old and relatively undisturbed, a site that never attracted the tidying impulses that gave other wells their stone kerbs and iron gates.