In a graveyard just north of a church in Derrinturn, Co. Kildare, a single flat stone sits flush with the ground. Lift it, or rather look past it, and below is a perfectly circular well, its limestone walls carefully laid, with six stone steps descending from the western side to the water roughly a metre and a quarter below. The whole structure is small enough to miss entirely if you did not know to look, which is part of what makes it quietly remarkable.

The well is known as Fr. Byrne's Well, named for a nineteenth-century priest who, according to local tradition, blessed the water and gave the site its particular character. Holy wells throughout Ireland were commonly associated with specific ailments, and this one was visited for the cure of toothache. The occasion for that visit was Trinity Sunday, the eighth Sunday after Easter, one of many such pattern days in the Irish calendar when people would gather at a well to pray, perform rounds, and seek healing. The church beside the graveyard was built in 1809, making it a near-contemporary of whatever period Fr. Byrne's blessing belongs to. A plaque on the well records its restoration in 1999, and the structure itself, with its tidy limestone coursing, speaks to a tradition of care for the site over a long period. A second holy well is recorded in the same townland, suggesting that Derrinturn once had a notably concentrated local devotional landscape.