Lady's Well at Fantstown, a small clear spring beside the ruins of Fantstown church in County Limerick, was once a well-frequented site of popular devotion, drawing crowds on the fifteenth of August each year for what was known as a pattern. A pattern, short for patron, was a gathering held on a saint's feast day at a sacred site, typically combining prayers, processions, and a good deal of socialising. This one quietly ceased sometime around 1820, not through neglect or forgetting, but by deliberate clerical decision.

The reason for that decision is recorded in the folklore. According to details gathered by Ó Danachair in 1955, the parish priest was returning from the well one night when he was shot by Whiteboys, the agrarian secret society whose activities were widespread in rural Munster during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. That priest was Father Mulqueen, parish priest, murdered in November 1819, an event documented by Begley in 1906. His successor, apparently unwilling to see the well continue as a gathering point following the killing, abolished the pattern altogether. A large ash tree once grew beside the spring, a detail worth noting because ash trees frequently appear in association with holy wells in Ireland, regarded as sacred or protective presences. The 1840 Ordnance Survey map still names the site Lady's Well, a dedication to the Virgin Mary that was common across the country.

The well sits beside the remains of Fantstown church, which provides a rough navigational anchor for anyone looking to find it. The site today sees almost no visitors, a fact Ó Danachair observed in the mid-twentieth century and which is unlikely to have changed significantly since. There is no pattern to attend, no feast-day crowd, no ceremony that marks the calendar. What remains is the spring itself, the church ruin, and the particular quiet of a place that was once considered worth gathering at, then abruptly was not.