And yet something about the well at Kildromin, in County Limerick, has kept it from disappearing entirely from local memory, even when the devotional life around it had all but faded away.

The well is dedicated to St Brigid, one of Ireland's most widely venerated saints, and it carries the legend common to several wells associated with her: that she was refused a drink somewhere nearby, struck the ground in response, and water rose up from the earth. Holy wells of this kind, places where water was believed to have sacred or curative properties and where patterns, meaning seasonal ritual gatherings, were once observed, are found across Ireland in considerable number. What distinguishes this one is the fragmentary quality of its record. It was first noted in print by O'Kelly, writing in the North Munster Antiquarian Journal in 1944, and the folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair documented it a decade later in 1955, recording that devotion to the well had lapsed but had seen a brief revival in 1940 on St Brigid's feast day, the first of February. By the time Ó Danachair was writing, the original ritual associated with the site was already unknown, the continuity having been broken at some point that nobody could pinpoint.

For anyone hoping to visit, the practical situation is straightforward in its difficulty: the well is not marked on maps, which makes locating it a matter of local enquiry rather than navigation. The site is described as badly kept and damaged by cattle, so expectations should be set accordingly. There is no infrastructure here, no signage or cleared path. What remains is a water source in a rural Limerick landscape, carrying a name and a legend that outlasted the devotional practices once built around them, and recorded almost incidentally before those too could dissolve entirely.