That ambiguity is, in its own way, the whole story. Associated with the holy well at Barnabrack, a site of the kind once central to local devotional life in rural Ireland, there exists a tradition of a cross or cross-inscribed stone. Cross-inscribed stones are among the most enduring markers of early Christian presence in Ireland, sometimes little more than a rough incision cut into a flat rock near a place of veneration. But at Barnabrack, the object that tradition insists upon has never been found.

The tradition was recorded in 1989 by M. A. Timoney, passed on as a personal communication rather than a formal discovery. No one who went looking could locate the stone. It may have been moved, buried, or simply absorbed back into the ground over the centuries. Holy wells in Ireland were often accompanied by small devotional objects, stations for prayer, and marked stones, many of which were gradually lost as active use of such sites declined. What survives at Barnabrack is the well itself, and the memory of something else that once stood nearby, or perhaps still does.