The problem is that nobody has been able to find it in recent years, which gives this particular holy well an air of quiet, unresolved mystery that most sites of its kind do not carry.

The well was recorded by Power in 1940, who described a shallow basin set at the floor of the glen, accompanied by a cross-inscribed flagstone. That flagstone is the telling detail. The practice of performing "rounds" at a holy well, in which a devotee walks a prescribed number of circuits around the site while reciting prayers, is one of the oldest forms of popular religious observance in Ireland, and the worn or marked stones associated with these rituals are often the most durable evidence that the practice ever took place. Power noted signs of recent use at the time of writing, suggesting the site was still an active place of local devotion in the early twentieth century. By the time the Cork archaeological inventory was being compiled later in the century, fieldworkers could no longer locate it. Whether the basin silted up, the vegetation closed over it, or local memory of its precise position simply faded, the record does not say.