Cartern's Well, outside Ballintober in County Galway, is one such site, recorded as a monument of archaeological interest but sitting, for now, at the edges of documented history. The name itself is the most suggestive thing about it. "Cartern" does not belong to any obvious saint's calendar, which raises the possibility that it preserves an older personal name or a corruption of something once more legible, the kind of linguistic residue that wells tend to collect over generations.

Holy wells in Ireland were typically venerated as places of healing or devotion, often associated with a local saint and visited on a particular pattern day, sometimes with prayers, offerings, or circuits walked in a prescribed direction. Many were absorbed into Christian practice while retaining older associations with water spirits or curative properties specific to a complaint, bad eyes being a common one, or skin ailments, or troubles with livestock. Without further records available for this particular site, it is not possible to say which tradition, if any, gathered around Cartern's Well, or whether it was ever the focus of a pattern. What can be said is that the act of naming a well, and holding that name across centuries of map-making and land change, is itself a form of preservation.