Official cartography has covered Ireland in considerable detail since the nineteenth century, yet this spring in Beheens, in north Kerry, slipped through entirely, known only to local memory under the Irish name Tobar Uí Laighin, a name recorded by the Folklore Commission of Ireland in 1938 and 1939. That the Commission captured it at all suggests it still carried some local significance at the time, even if the mapmakers had never acknowledged its existence.

The well is thought to have been dedicated to St Brigid, one of Ireland's three patron saints, whose association with holy wells, healing, and fresh water runs deep across the country. Holy wells were focal points for patterns, the traditional gatherings of prayer and communal ritual that persisted in many parishes well into the modern era, and a Brigidine dedication would have placed this site within a very old devotional landscape. What remains of that landscape here is sparse. The well lies to the south-west of a burial ground that has since been levelled, so even its closest neighbour in the historical record has largely vanished from the surface. The pairing of well and burial ground is not unusual in early Irish ecclesiastical settings, where both water source and grave precinct often clustered around a founding saint's memory, but the physical evidence at Beheens has been reduced to almost nothing.