In the south-east corner of a field at Ballymacave in County Limerick, on the western bank of a stream running through open pasture, there is nothing to see. No stone surround, no votive offerings, no worn path to the water's edge. The well dedicated to St. James has, as the folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair recorded in 1955, simply disappeared, lost to a drainage scheme at some point before his writing.

Ó Danachair's note, published in 1955 and cited at page 203 of his study, is the principal record of what the site once was and how it was used. The well was visited on the eve of the feast of St. James, which falls on the 25th of June, and the timing mattered: people came at dawn, in that liminal hour before full daylight that was traditionally considered especially potent for holy well rituals. Rags were hung on the surrounding bushes, a practice known across Ireland as part of the pattern, or patron, the local devotional gathering associated with a saint's day. The rags, sometimes called clooties, were believed to transfer illness or petition to the saint as they slowly decayed. The dedication to St. James connects this small rural well to a saint whose cult, centred on Santiago de Compostela in Spain, had a surprisingly wide reach in medieval Irish devotional geography.

There is, practically speaking, very little for a visitor to find. The field at Ballymacave holds no visible surface trace of the well, and the drainage work that erased it left no marker. The site sits in agricultural land, and access would depend on the goodwill of whoever farms it. What makes it worth knowing about is precisely its absence: the fact that a place of annual early-morning pilgrimage, where people tied cloth to branches and waited for the light, can vanish so completely into an improved field. Denis Power compiled the record for the database, uploaded in August 2011, drawing on Ó Danachair's fieldwork as its source. The documentation of the site is now, in a real sense, all that remains of it.