Others disappear quietly into the landscape, absorbed by the ordinary business of land management, leaving almost nothing behind. St. Catherine's Well at Crockshane, in the parish of Rathcoole in County Dublin, belongs to the second category. What was once a holy well, likely approached by stone steps and visited by those seeking the intercession of its patron saint, now lies along a field ditch that has been widened and deepened over time, with all apparent trace of the well itself removed in the process.

Holy wells are a widespread feature of the Irish landscape, typically small natural springs that became associated with a particular saint and served as focal points for local devotion, often on the saint's feast day. This one was dedicated to St. Catherine, as recorded by folklorist and cultural geographer Caoimhín Ó Danachair in 1958. His documentation, cited in the compiled record, is now among the few sources that confirm the site existed at all. The detail about original steps suggests a degree of deliberate construction or at least careful management of access, which was not unusual for wells that attracted regular visitors. At some point after that record was made, drainage or agricultural work altered the ditch sufficiently to erase the well's physical presence.

For anyone curious enough to look for it, the site sits within the Rathcoole parish area to the south-west of Dublin city. There is no visible structure to find, and the field ditch gives little indication of what it once contained. The interest here is less in what can be seen and more in the process of erasure itself, the way a place of local significance can be unmade so thoroughly that only a mid-twentieth-century footnote confirms it was ever there. The record was compiled by Geraldine Stout and revised by Caimin O'Brien, with the most recent upload dated April 2023, suggesting that even sites reduced to near-nothing are still considered worth tracking.