The Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which recorded countless antiquities across the Irish landscape during the nineteenth century, passed this one over entirely. And yet locally, the well has long carried a different kind of weight, recognised in the area as a holy well, the sort of place that accumulated reverence long before anyone thought to classify or catalogue it.

Its Irish name, Tobar na gCoinín, translates roughly as the well of the rabbits, a detail that sets it quietly apart from the more devotional placenames that tend to attach to such sites. Holy wells, scattered throughout Ireland in their thousands, were typically associated with saints or with healing traditions, visited on pattern days and dressed with offerings of cloth or medals. Whether Tobar na gCoinín ever drew that kind of ritual attention is not recorded, but its local recognition as a holy well places it within that broad and ancient tradition. The well sits immediately to the north-west of a castle, a proximity that may be coincidental or may reflect the tendency of such springs to attract settlement and significance in the same breath. Its construction is simple and functional: a natural spring enclosed by a drystone wall, the kind of unmortared stonework built by fitting stones carefully against one another, and roofed with flat limestone lintels that have kept the water sheltered, probably for a very long time.