That sentence contains almost everything that can be said with certainty about this particular site, and yet that uncertainty is itself a kind of story. Holy wells are among the oldest continuously venerated features in the Irish landscape, places where pre-Christian water worship quietly absorbed Christian meaning over centuries, accumulating dedications to local saints, patterns of seasonal pilgrimage, and small offerings left by visitors. Thousands are scattered across the country, many without signage, some without living memory of their use.

Clare is unusually rich in such sites. The county's limestone geology produces springs and seeps in abundance, and many of these acquired sacred associations long before any church was built nearby. A holy well might be nothing more than a modest hollow in a field, sometimes lined with stone, sometimes shaded by a lone hawthorn hung with cloth offerings known as clooties. The pattern, a ritual gathering held on the feast day of a patron saint, was once the social and spiritual calendar of rural parishes, and the well was its focal point. In Derryharriv, as in so many small townlands, the details of that history remain local knowledge, passed between neighbours rather than set down in any widely accessible form.