Tradition, neglect, or the slow drift of local memory are far more common culprits. But in this corner of County Limerick, it was a deliberate act by a named individual that ended centuries of religious visitation to a spring known in Irish as Tobar an Uarain, meaning the well of the cold spring.

When Ordnance Survey fieldworkers recorded the well around 1840, they found it in a low marshy field and noted what it had once meant to the local community. Parishioners had paid religious visits to it and believed its water could cure impotence. That kind of curative reputation was not unusual for Irish holy wells, which were often associated with specific ailments or patron saints and visited on particular feast days. What was unusual here was the ending of that tradition. According to the Ordnance Survey Name Books, one John Croker Esq. prohibited visitors to the well around 1830, and by the time the surveyors arrived a decade later, cattle had reduced it to a quagmire. The record is terse, offering no explanation for Croker's decision, which makes it all the more striking. The well appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey map within the townland of Rochestown, though subsequent changes to townland boundaries mean it now falls within Ballynagarde. Roughly 320 metres to the northwest lies a second well, also recorded under the name Toberanoran, though this one does not appear in the Name Books at all.

The site is not a managed heritage location, and the description from 1840 gives little reason to expect much survives above ground. The marshy, low-lying character of the field is likely unchanged, and the well itself may remain waterlogged or entirely obscured. Anyone with a particular interest in Irish holy well traditions or in the social history of landlord-tenant relations in pre-Famine Limerick might find the site worth tracing on a large-scale map, bearing in mind that access across private farmland would require permission. The proximity of the second, unrecorded well to the northwest adds a further layer of curiosity for those inclined to look carefully at what the landscape still conceals.