This one in Ballyboghil, north County Dublin, carries almost none of that. By 1958 it had been reduced, in the words of the surveyor who recorded it, to a muddy pool in a field fence dike, sitting roughly a hundred yards from the ruins of Ballyboghill old church. The folklore gathered from the local school was equally spare: no tradition connected with the well, just a note that a spring was still there. For a site classed as a holy well, that near-total silence is itself worth pausing over.

The well is dedicated to St Bretcha, though the saint's name has accumulated variants over time, appearing in sources as Braitsea, Braitsi, Braitsan, and Breacan, suggesting a figure whose identity was already blurring at the edges of local memory. The folklorist and photographer Caoimhín Ó Danachair recorded the site in 1958, noting it was known locally as St Bretsha's well, and his photographs of the location are held by the National Folklore Collection at UCD. The Schools' Collection, a vast archive of folklore gathered by Irish schoolchildren in the late 1930s, includes a hand-drawn sketch map of Ballyboghil village that marks the well's position, offering one of the clearest guides to where it once stood. Holy wells, as a category, are natural springs or water sources that accumulated Christian devotional significance, often layered over much older associations with water and healing, and they are common across Ireland. What distinguishes this one is the absence of that layering: no cures, no patron, no pattern.

The well sits in agricultural land close to the old church ruin at Ballyboghill, a village in the Fingal area of north Dublin. Anyone looking to locate it would do well to consult the sketch map in the Schools' Collection, accessible through the Dúchas digital archive, which places it in relation to the village's other landmarks. The church ruin itself, a more substantial and visible feature in the landscape, makes a useful reference point. Ó Danachair's photographs, also available through the Dúchas archive under references F024.06.00277 and F024.06.00278, give a sense of what the site looked like in the mid-twentieth century, when it was already more ditch than shrine.