The one at Ballynora, in County Cork, offers none of that. What it offers instead is a water-filled hollow tucked beneath a sycamore tree on a steep, grazed hillside, where the roots of the tree have grown around and into the well itself, enclosing it in a loose cage of wood and earth. The water does not bubble up from below in the conventional sense; it drips down through the roots from above, collecting in the hollow they have shaped.

Holy wells, as a category, tend to accumulate layers of use over centuries, often sitting at the junction of pre-Christian water veneration and later Catholic devotional practice. Many were formally dedicated to saints, maintained by local communities, and visited on pattern days tied to a particular feast. This one, set in rough pasture in the Ballynora area south-west of Cork city, carries none of that visible apparatus. The sycamore, not a native Irish tree but one that has been present in Ireland since at least the sixteenth century, has effectively become the well's architecture. A trough to the south-east now catches some of the overflow, the only sign of any intervention in the site's arrangement.

The well sits in working farmland on a hillside, so access would depend on landowner permission and the practical realities of uneven, sloping pasture. The sycamore roots and the hollow they enclose are the thing to look for; the well has no marker, no signage, and no formal infrastructure around it.