There is nothing to see, no stonework, no votive offerings, no worn path to a spring. What remains is the knowledge that something was here, and that people came to it.

The well was the focus of a pattern, the Irish term for a gathering held on a saint's feast day, combining prayer, procession, and often a good deal of socialising. This one fell on the 25th of July, the feast of St James. The Ordnance Survey Name Books, compiled in the nineteenth century as part of the extensive mapping and documentation of Ireland, recorded the well and its associated pattern day, which suggests the tradition was still alive or at least remembered when surveyors passed through. The well sat beside a graveyard, a pairing that was common in rural Ireland, where the boundaries between the living and the dead, between the sacred and the everyday, were understood rather differently than they might be today. Holy wells were frequently associated with healing, with particular ailments, or with the intercession of a local saint, though no such specific attribution has been recorded here.