This one in the Crowagh River valley in County Sligo has none of those things. It is called, simply, 'The Blessed Well', and beyond that designation the usual apparatus of Irish sacred water sites is entirely absent. No patron saint claimed it, no annual gathering drew pilgrims to it, no cure was ever attributed to it. The blessing, it seems, was strictly practical: a reliable source of fresh water in a landscape otherwise given over to blanket bog.

The well sits at the base of the river valley, on a flat, grassy tongue of ground enclosed on three sides by a meander of the Crowagh River. The valley side rises sharply to the west, giving way almost immediately to an expanse of upland bog. The well itself is a carefully made thing, a rectangular pit roughly 2.4 metres long and just over a metre wide, sunk to a depth of around half a metre, with vertical sides and several large stones laid as rough paving at its southern end. A narrow channel runs from the north corner for about four metres to the riverbank, carrying the overflow away. It is built with the quiet competence of something made to be used rather than venerated. That use was straightforward: turf harvesters working the surrounding bogland came here to drink. The cutting of turf, the traditional hand-harvesting of peat as domestic fuel, was hard and thirsty work, and a clean, still well set apart from the peaty river water beside it would have been worth more to a working crew than any number of votive offerings.