The one at Tallavnamraher, on the north-western slope of Mount Mary in County Galway, is something altogether more elusive. No visible surface trace of it survives. There is no stone surround, no worn path, no rag tree hung with intentions. The well exists now primarily as a cartographic fact, a name and a symbol committed to the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in 1931, and then, at some point after that, lost to the pastureland that surrounds it.

Holy wells in Ireland were typically freshwater springs or pools associated with a local saint or with pre-Christian veneration of water sources. They served as sites of pilgrimage, healing, and communal ritual, and many were recorded only because nineteenth and early twentieth-century mapmakers made a point of noting them, sometimes long after the traditions attached to them had faded. The OS six-inch series, produced across several editions from the 1830s onwards, captured a great deal that would otherwise have vanished without record. In Tallavnamraher's case, the 1931 mapping preserves at least the knowledge that a well considered significant enough to name once existed on this quiet, north-westerly slope. What happened to it between that moment of cartographic recognition and the present day is unrecorded.