The well at Cooloorta, in the flat farmland of north County Galway, offers none of this. What survives is a circular hollow roughly two metres across, filled in with earth and stone, and partially ringed by a low earthen bank curving from south through west to north. Without knowing what you were looking at, you might walk straight past it.

The site is dedicated to St Kevin, a figure most closely associated with the monastery of Glendalough in County Wicklow, though dedications to him are scattered across Ireland, carried outward by the influence of his cult in the early medieval period. Holy wells, as a category of site, typically combine pre-Christian reverence for water sources with later Christian practice, often becoming focal points for local pattern days, the annual gatherings of prayer and communal observance that were once a central feature of rural Irish religious life. At Cooloorta, the physical evidence of all that history has been almost entirely lost. The earthen bank, which in a better-preserved well might once have enclosed a stone-lined basin or a protective structure, is the sole remaining hint of the site's former shape and significance.