Many are springs or seeps, some are stone-lined pools, and a few, like this one at Cornaveigh in County Cork, have long since lost their water entirely. What remains is a small oval enclosure built from dry stone, just under a metre high and a little over a metre across at its widest point, roofed with a lintel and white-washed inside. The whitewash is a detail worth pausing on: it suggests a structure that was once maintained, kept clean, treated as something set apart from the ordinary farmyard it sits beside.

The well stands south of the avenue leading into a farmyard, a quietly marginal position that is actually fairly typical for such sites, occupying the threshold between the domestic and something older. A collapsed stone-lined channel, roughly a metre long and half a metre wide, once carried water away from the well into a dry streambed, which in turn connects to another stream that has been piped beneath the avenue. The hydrology, in other words, has been thoroughly reorganised over time, which may account for the well running dry. Holy wells were venerated sites across Ireland for centuries, and often long before Christianity gave them new dedications; the practice of tending, visiting, and sometimes doing rounds at such wells persisted well into the twentieth century in many parts of Cork and Kerry. This one at Cornaveigh retains the physical form of that tradition even as the water itself has gone.