Somewhere on the south-western slope of the Hill of Allen in County Kildare, a holy well dedicated to St. Coleman has effectively vanished. It does not appear on the 1910 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the area is now thick with whitethorn and briar, and recent attempts to locate it on the ground have come up empty. What remains is the memory of a place that once drew pilgrims and held its own small ceremonial life, now swallowed by scrub.

The well sits within a landscape that was already layered with significance. The Hill of Allen, rising to around 670 feet above sea level, is associated in Irish mythology with Fionn Mac Cumhaill and the Fianna, and close to the well's supposed location there are traces of a possible ecclesiastical enclosure. The well itself was a focus for a pattern, the traditional Irish gathering at a sacred site combining prayer, ritual circuits, and communal celebration, held annually at least up to the 1880s. The date in question was St. Peter's Day, the 29th of June, when pilgrims would have made their way down the moderately steep slope to reach a spot shaded, according to older descriptions, by several old trees and bushes. The well was credited with the power to cure warts, a modest but telling detail; many holy wells in Ireland accumulated specific healing attributes over time, often tied closely to the saint they were named after, though in this case the connection between Coleman and warts is not elaborated in any surviving account.

By the early twentieth century the well had already slipped below the threshold of what the Ordnance Survey considered worth marking, suggesting its visible presence at ground level had either dried up or become too obscured to record. The whitethorn and briar that now cover the area make independent investigation difficult, and the well's exact position relative to the ecclesiastical enclosure above it remains uncertain. It is one of those sites where the documentary trace outlasts the physical one, a name and a date and a handful of cures surviving longer than the water itself.