There is no elaborate stonework here, no carved saint, no votive tree draped in cloth strips. Just an active spring emerging from marsh, quiet and persistent.

Holy wells in Ireland occupy a category all their own, neither straightforwardly pagan nor entirely Christian, but carrying elements of both across centuries of use. They were, and in many cases still are, sites of pattern days, rounds, and quiet personal petition, places where the boundary between the everyday and the sacred was understood to be thinner than usual. The well at Killour sits in wettish pasture to the north-north-east of a related archaeological feature, suggesting this small corner of the landscape held some cluster of significance. A survey of Ballinrobe and the surrounding district, including the shores of Lough Mask and Lough Carra, recorded it in 1994, noting little more than its presence and its source, which is itself a kind of testimony to how understated these sites can be.