Tobar Pádraig, or St Patrick's Well, once drew crowds on the 17th of March each year, its waters credited with curing sores, toothache, and unspecified pains in both people and livestock. Farmers sprinkled the water on crops and churns. An elm tree beside the open well was hung with rags, medals, and drinking cups, in the tradition of votive offerings common at Irish holy wells, where objects left behind were thought to transfer an ailment or mark an act of devotion. By around 1890, all of this had quietly stopped.

The well appears on the 1840 Ordnance Survey map, already labelled as St Patrick's Well, and it is recorded as the origin of the placename Patrickswell. The folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair documented the site in 1955, drawing on both local memory and Samuel Lewis's Topographical Dictionary, which noted that a carved stone slab had recently been placed in the wall beside the well. That slab, which bears a rough figure of St Patrick and the inscription "Erected by Thos McNamara and S Breay", appears to date from around the beginning of the nineteenth century. The great elm tree is long gone. At some point around the cessation of devotions in 1890, a pump was erected over the well, converting it into something more functional and less ceremonial. That pump has since been removed as well. Children from Lurga National School recorded what remained of local knowledge in the mid-twentieth century Schools' Collection, noting simply that there had once been a blessed well, and that it had become a pump.

The site is in Ballyanrahan, on the edge of Patrickswell village in County Limerick. The carved slab in the wall is the most legible surviving feature, and it is worth looking at closely given how much has otherwise disappeared from the site. A photograph taken by Ó Danachair in 1954, held by the National Folklore Collection at UCD, gives a sense of what the well looked like in the mid-twentieth century and is accessible through the Dúchas digital archive at duchas.ie.