About 150 metres north of Castle Bellew in County Galway, what was once a holy well now amounts to little more than a pile of rubble and a loose cluster of trees. Holy wells were, and in many places still are, sites of veneration in the Irish landscape, traditionally associated with healing, pattern days, and the leaving of small offerings. This one has lost its water, but not entirely its purpose.

Writing in 1983, a researcher named Claffey noted that the tree standing to the north-east of the group was reputed to hold curative water in a hollow within its trunk. The idea that healing properties might migrate from a well to a living tree beside it is not uncommon in Irish folk tradition; the sacred quality of a place was understood to reside in the ground itself, and could persist or shift into whatever grew there. Castle Bellew, the nearby house after which the well is named, sits just to the south, lending the site a loose geographical anchor in an otherwise quiet stretch of north Galway.