It never does, until a storm descends on a small spring tucked beneath a low east-facing scarp at An Baile Láir in Béal An Daingin, County Galway, and still the candle holds. That is the legend attached to Tobar Ann, a natural spring whose local name preserves a personal one, though whose Ann it commemorates is no longer known.

The story, recorded by the writer and cartographer Tim Robinson, frames the well as the end of a penitential circuit of the entire island. The woman had been told she would find forgiveness for her sins at the place where her candle refused to be extinguished. The fact that it survived a terrible wind at this particular spring, rather than at any of the more celebrated sites she had already visited, is the quietly subversive logic at the heart of the tale. Holy wells in Ireland were, and in many cases remain, sites of local devotion, often predating Christianity and absorbed into it over centuries. They typically attract patterns, the traditional rounds of prayer and circumambulation performed on a saint's feast day, and the physical features at Tobar Ann, a concrete surround and a cross, suggest it has retained some degree of active use or maintenance into recent times.

The well sits beneath a small east-facing scarp at An Baile Láir, Béal An Daingin, which lies in the Connemara region of west Galway. Its modest, unelaborate appearance is fairly typical of wells whose significance rests more in oral tradition than in formal religious architecture.