In a wooded glen on the western edge of the Aghmarta demesne in County Cork, there is a holy well that cannot be found. Surveyors have looked and come away empty-handed, the site recorded as overgrown and unlocatable, which gives it a particular quality: a place that exists more fully in documentation than in the landscape itself.

The well was known locally as the Short Little Well, a name that carries a faint note of affection, or perhaps literalism. Writing in 1919, a researcher named O'Leary placed it within Aghmarta townland but noted even then that there was no trace of it remaining. Holy wells in Ireland were typically focal points for patterns, the local devotional gatherings involving prayer, circumambulation, and sometimes cure-seeking at the water's edge, and their gradual disappearance from the landscape, swallowed by vegetation or simply forgotten as communities shifted, is not unusual. What is slightly unusual here is that the absence has been so thoroughly documented, layer upon layer, across more than a century.