The one at Baunmore, in County Clare, sits within this ambiguity. Clare alone holds dozens of such sites, each with its own local character, patron saint, pattern day, or accumulated folklore, and Baunmore's well is among those that have slipped quietly beneath the level of widespread documentation.

The practice of venerating springs and wells reaches back well before Christianity in Ireland, and the early Church, rather than suppressing it, tended to absorb it, attaching saints' names to existing sites and incorporating the visits, known as patterns, into the liturgical calendar. A pattern was a communal gathering held on a saint's feast day, combining prayer, ritual circumambulation of the well, and often socialising. Many such gatherings were gradually discouraged by the Church in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a significant number of wells fell into quieter, more private use as a result. County Clare's landscape of limestone and glacial drift creates the underground water movement that feeds many of these springs, giving them a quality of appearing and disappearing that must have seemed remarkable to earlier observers.

Baunmore itself is a townland name suggesting open or fair ground, and the presence of a holy well there places it within a wider pattern of sacred water sites distributed across the county's rural townlands. Without more detailed local record, the specific saint associated with this well, any surviving pattern traditions, or the physical form of the site, whether it has a stone surround, votive offerings, or a sheltering tree, remains uncertain from available sources.