At the foot of a steep, wooded scarp in Kilcannon, County Wexford, a natural spring sits in the overgrown margins of the River Slaney's flood-plain, having spent decades on official maps wearing a designation it may never have earned. The spring owes its supposed sacred status to a single cartographic decision: it was labelled a holy well on the 1940 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, and the name stuck in the record even as the ground itself offered no evidence to support it. No stone surround, no votive offerings, no trace of the kind of ritual tending that typically marks a venerated site in the Irish landscape.

Locally, the spring has always gone by a different name altogether: Collier's Well. That name, rooted in the community rather than the surveyor's notation, points to an entirely secular identity. A small stream running northeast to southwest separates the well from a medieval church roughly forty metres away to the northeast, and it is possible that proximity to that ecclesiastical site was enough to suggest, or simply to invite, the holy well label when the 1940 map was being compiled. Holy wells in Ireland were typically marked by patterns of pilgrimage, by clootie rags tied to nearby branches, by stone basins worn smooth by generations of use. None of that appears here. What remains is a quiet spring in a damp, shaded hollow, the Slaney running about a hundred and fifty metres to the east, and a place-name that gestures towards something more ordinary and more local than sanctity.