It is easy to miss, the kind of feature that registers as a roadside puddle before you notice the stone, the stream running away to the north-east, and the accumulated weight of a name: this is Adamnan's Well, dedicated to the seventh-century abbot and scholar Adomnán of Iona, best known as the biographer of Saint Columba and the author of the law Cáin Adomnáin, which sought to protect women, children, and clergy from the violence of warfare.

Holy wells, in the Irish tradition, are springs or pools associated with a particular saint, typically the focus of local veneration and pattern days, the annual gatherings of prayer and custom that continued in many places well into the modern era. The dedication here to Adomnán is quietly significant: his cult spread well beyond Iona into Ireland, and wells carrying his name tend to appear in areas with strong early medieval ecclesiastical networks. The landscape around this one still carries that layering. Immediately to the west sits a monumental structure, the nature of which suggests this corner of Sligo held ceremonial or religious importance long before any formal church was built. Some eighty metres to the south-west stand the remains of a church and graveyard, a proximity that is typical of holy wells, which were often sited in deliberate relationship with the sacred buildings that followed them or, in some cases, preceded them.